Tina Brown Quotes

The natural creativity of the staff morphed ‘The Daily Beast’ very fast into what has become a newsroom. Aggregation lives on the Cheat Sheet, the video player, and in the breaking news slot in the first big box. The rest is all original, generated by Beast writers and editors.

Everyone is someone else’s catalyst for selling something these days.

Schwarzenegger is big, he’s noisy, he’s larger than life, and he’s earned the credibility to be cast for the role of America’s Green superhero.

There is nothing radical about Obama except the fact of who he is.

Bill Clinton, talking about the need to financially empower wives and mothers in regressive countries, once remarked that women have ‘the responsibility gene.’ No one has that gene more markedly than his wife.

American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long, a whole generation gave up on them.

I keep thinking about how terrifyingly vulnerable women are in so many countries.

It’s interesting how the view from abroad can shift and remake perceptions of homegrown celebrities, the ones who are part of the gross domestic product.

Public life has become so gladiatorial. Every day, another reputation bites the dust.

Owning news makes you important; it gives you a seat at the table.

Nothing is better for a young journalist than to go and write about something that other people don’t know about. If you can afford to send yourself to some foreign part, I still think that’s by far the best way to break in.

The Duke of York has never remarried.

The women of Afghanistan, left behind as their men fought, did what the women of World War II did – used their wits and resourcefulness to preserve some semblance of civilization.

The number one way of becoming powerful in Washington is by becoming the ‘Washington Post.’

Corporate communications will become a high-tech art, just as political communication is for Obama.

Obama, for all his brilliance, has no real, felt understanding of management structures or of business.

The British Isles are awash with the choice of beautiful historic churches, abbeys, and cathedrals where one king or another has tied the knot and bestowed a royal precedent.

Periodically, ‘The New York Times’ runs a business news story lamenting how few women still make it to the top in the Wall Street boys’ club. Could it be that women are choosing to be conscientious objectors in these wars of one against all?

There is nobody more boring than the undefeated.

There are a multitude of mothers in the world who have a daughter who is stolen, or who are stolen daughters themselves.

I just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I’ve been or something I’ve done. Or politics. It’s going to what’s on my mind at the moment.

One of the the great things about having had something that didn’t work out is: So what? I am fine.

The Taliban knows they have more to fear from an educated girl than an American drone.

Back in his Chicago Senate days, when he was seeking greater black credibility, Obama was happy enough to attend the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

‘Vogue’ celebrates plenty of women of substance.

Celebrity these days is completely for sale; it’s not remotely mysterious. But there’s something that remains glamorous and mysterious about royalty.

Prince William’s smiling hostility toward the press is his non-negotiable core value. I am told he is so protective of his privacy he has been known to plant false tips with friends he distrusts and watch the media to see if they play out.

The comptroller of New York City ought to have all the characteristics of a major corporation’s CFO – quiet rigor, obsessive care for detail, incorruptible judgment, an ability to work assiduously behind the scenes with the key stakeholders.

It’s actually harder than it looks to be a good pundit on the air. You’ve got to have stuff to say.

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James’s ‘The Portrait of a Lady.’

Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies.

Obama achieved something in his first year with health care that successive presidents have been unable to achieve.

Along with all those books about Lincoln, Obama might read some biographies of Napoleon. The general who established the Legion d’Honneur understood that people fought as much for medals as for morals.

I am thrilled to share the news that Andrew Sullivan is bringing his trailblazing journalism to ‘The Daily Beast.’

Oprah’s stock in trade has always been her powerful unmediated connection. She could feel your pain and empower you to talk about it.

I know as much as anyone how much her most fervent supporters want Hillary Clinton to run for president.

It’s one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs.

In today’s gig economy, where jobs have been replaced by ‘portfolios of projects,’ most people find themselves doing more things less well for two-thirds of the money.

The rights of women are to the 21st century what civil rights were to the 20th.

It is ironic that American women now need to be fortified by the inspiration of the women of the Arab Spring, who risked so much to win basic human rights.

The post-presidency, as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have proved, is a win-win. Money, Nobels, the ability to leverage your global celebrity for any cause or hobbyhorse you wish, plus freedom to grab the mike whenever the urge takes you without any terminal repercussions.

Some weddings take longer to plan than others.

Movie stars today are as greedy for additional kids as bankers are for bonuses. It’s the new badge of authenticity.

Perhaps Obama is often slow to nail controversies because he needs time to live inside them for a while in his head. It’s unnerving for the rest of us, but even the haters, one feels, are made to think more deeply than they’d like before they return to the bickering and the games.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar turned out to be all hat and no cattle with his sorry oversight of the Minerals Management Service.

The viral power of online media has proven how fast creative ideas can be spread and adopted, using tools like cellphones, digital cameras, micro-credit, mobile banking, Facebook, and Twitter. A perfect example? The way the Green Movement in Iran caught fire thanks to social media.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the Obamacare tech nightmare is how wholly predictable it all was. Anyone who has been involved in building the most rudimentary of web operations knows nothing ever works as it’s supposed to. Even awesome Apple, mighty Microsoft, and gargantuan Google miss deadlines.

An enormous number of mothers in the U.S. are working double time, graveyard shifts, and more than one job just to put food on the table for their kids.

Whether it’s in Washington, or whether it’s with the mothers of extremists, or whether it’s education in places like Pakistan… a lot of women in these emerging countries are taking charge and doing amazing things.

When Obama heralds another ‘teachable moment,’ it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.

The digitally native generation has no idea what has been lost to the freedom of intimacy that has no fear of being recorded.

It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama’s meager resume – ‘a mere community organizer!’ – before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama’s experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.

Voters seem to understand what a big waste of time trying to change Washington is.

‘Worshipping in private,’ as Obama does, comes off as just another form of annoying elitism.

‘America’ is synonymous with opportunity.

The hazard of confessional books is how fast the world moves on while they’re written.

I don’t actually go to newsstands anymore.

By the end of ‘Game Change,’ one feels that the candidates’ few happy moments are those when they ‘lose it.’

Obama’s great asset has always been an ability to maintain his air of authority without being baritone about it. He can be boring, but he is never ridiculous or pompous.

Give Obama a script he has made his own, and he is the motivational speaker to end all speakers. Tony Robbins cloned with Honest Abe.

No one has put in harder training to become a royal bride than the glossy-haired Kate Middleton.

Unlike his predecessors, Obama is not big on ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ nostalgia.

Hillary Clinton has spent her entire career looking bug-eyed with incredulity when an interviewer asks her whatever question she most expects at that moment.

‘Out of the box’ corporate thinking helped carry real American innovation out in a box. A pine box.

Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks.

No one I know has a job anymore. They’ve got gigs.

Unlike the Kennedy dynasty, who always knew how to pay off people who might make trouble, the Windsors can’t bring themselves to part with any royal trinkets.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn’t take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans’ responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.

In the end, Dan Rather’s legend skewered him, CBS and the craft of journalism.

We live in a culture of destructive transparency.

Obama can’t change his cool disposition, though it would be nice if he lost the vaguely grudging air he gives off that problems of management get in the way of ideas.

Obama fans become more and more glum that he keeps flubbing the very role he was expected to be so good at: Therapist to the nation. The Great Comforter.

I just wanted to have fun for myself – I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions.

TV journalism is a much more collaborative, horizontal business than print reporting. It has to be, because of the logistics. Anchors are wholly dependent on producers to do all the hustling.

It’s Obama’s bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed.

Reputation is a timely subject, now that nobody has one.

What is new is the multiplying reach and volume of the Internet, concentrating the toxicity of destructive emotions and circulating them in the political bloodstream with unparalleled velocity.

In all the debate about Afghanistan, we don’t hear much about our obligation to the wretched lives of Afghan women. They are being treated as collateral damage as the big boys discuss geopolitical goals.

One common denominator of super-affluent alpha men is the conviction, unchallenged every day, that the world revolves around them.

I’m impressed with how ‘Newsweek’s’ outstanding staff has continued to put out a lively, well-informed magazine after the departure of their tireless editor, Jon Meacham.

Clinton passed his first budget without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Before it led to the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, it led to a Democratic defeat in the 1994 midterms.

Feminism in some ways has become quite dormant.

The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet’s permission, so is courage.

Everywhere you look, there’s a hunger to put the ethos by which Wall Street thrives on trial.

Perhaps it’s time to stop analyzing Sarah Palin as a politician. Maybe, in her own muddled way, she is at last owning up to the fact that she has been miscast. You don’t need politics anymore once you’ve discovered that the alchemy of celebrity has turned you into a 24-carat phenomenon.

Until 1869, when they were banned, debtors’ prisons were the great incinerators of British reputations. Those who were unable to pay their bills were jailed until their creditors were paid – an unlikely event, given that the prisoner was unable to work.

It’s as if inside the White House the belief in Obama’s inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it’s a startling revelation.

The question for Obama is how he can rein in the furies of populism while making us all feel the malefactors of great wealth are being sufficiently punished.

Does Obama create confusion on purpose?

Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton.

I love to run smart essays and commentary. But it doesn’t replace the other kind of reporting.

Politicians have always been required to be fake, but now the career havoc wrought by a stray, flying sound bite means they have to sustain their fakeness all the time.

‘The Daily Beast’ competes in the highly Darwinian media world filled with hyper-smart, highly adaptive, tool-using people with opposable thumbs.

Almost every media organization is doing something with live events now, and that’s because they feel they can break through that way.

I think that big, sort of theatrical relaunches tend to set you up for failure and hype.

I’m trying to be entertaining without being mean.

Servility always curdles into rage in the end.

Glenn Beck is Rush redux – Limbaugh with liposuction, partying like it’s still 1993.

Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides credit to productive enterprise. Whatever.