“A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'”

“Admitting weakness seems to be such a severe psychic threat for Bush that when he makes a mistake it's safer just to reinforce it. The strategy creates a perverse system of rewards and punishments.”

“After so much reality TV and confessional celebrity interviews, the public is tired of accessible stars. Who needs them to be 'Just Like Us?' 'Just Like Us' means just as boring as we are.”

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

“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.”

“'America' is synonymous with opportunity.”

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

“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.”

“Any great, long career has at least one flameout in it.”

“Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Being president, you may have more power than anyone else in the country, but you quickly discover that you have much, much less than you thought you'd have going in. You're hamstrung in ways you never dreamed of.”

“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.”

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

“Captain Richard Phillips of the good ship Maersk Alabama - and Sully Sullenberger splashing down his crippled airliner in the Hudson River - broke through the poisonous smog of economic depression and Wall Street skullduggery with a reminder that pure individual heroism is a daily occurrence if we know where to look for it.”

“CBS's Ed Murrow may have been over-celebrated as the principled observer for the masses, fair yet unafraid to take on the bullies.”

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

“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.”

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

“Disinterested public service has become, just so... what's the phrase, 'old school.'”

“Does Obama create confusion on purpose?”

“Economics has become as riveting as politics.”

“Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies.”

“Even as the whole world tries to hang on to its job, there is also this weird parallel sense - almost a covert longing - that the old corrupt structures on which that job depends needs to be, ought to be, swept away.”

“Everyone is someone else's catalyst for selling something these days.”

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

“Feminism in some ways has become quite dormant.”

“For a guy who believes in hope, Obama doesn't seem to be able to spread much of it around. How can he? We know too much now about the hollowness of institutions and the frailty of their leaders.”

“For Sarah Palin, the least experienced on the world stage, the stress of maintaining the fiction that she was qualified to be vice president sent her over the deep end almost immediately. She went off on a ferocious spending spree that might have killed a lesser woman. Katie Couric's straightforward questions unraveled her.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Glenn Beck is Rush redux - Limbaugh with liposuction, partying like it's still 1993.”

“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.”

“I am thrilled to share the news that Andrew Sullivan is bringing his trailblazing journalism to 'The Daily Beast.'”

“I don't actually go to newsstands anymore.”

“I haven't spent years, like Alyse Nelson of Vital Voices, toiling for female economic empowerment on five continents.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I think British journalists do well in America because the newspaper culture there is so strong - telling stories and presenting them readably is in their DNA. British newspapers get a terrible rap, but they are brilliant in their presentation, most of them, so full of vitality and literary wit.”

“I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print.”

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

“I wish my daughter wasn't spending time thinking of Kim Kardashian or Rihanna.”

“If a star football player can have a mythical girlfriend, why can't I have a mythical Congress?”

“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.”

“I'm trying to be entertaining without being mean.”

“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.”

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

“In the world of screens, we're all tired of screens. That's why I think that live events have become so popular.”

“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.”

“In TV, you always feel you are standing on the tracks of an oncoming train.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“It was Barry Diller's idea to start 'The Daily Beast,' and he has turned out to be the best partner I've ever had. There's no one better to go into the jungle with.”

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

“It's almost as if Putin is brilliant, really - he's outfoxing Obama all the time.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's so thrilling to be intimidated.”

“I've always been very enamored of European newsmagazines - the 'Spiegel' kind of magazine, which has an energetic, high-low approach to news.”

“Let's face it: innovation in the U.S. is now the province of our thriving city-states. We all know that nothing happens in Washington anymore.”

“Magazine articles are the new books.”

“More Brazilian women earn Ph.D.s every year than do men.”

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

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

“No one I know has a job anymore. They've got gigs.”

“No one is asking for an Oprah in Chief. Anyhow, Obama is too chilly by nature ever to be convincing as a human care package.”

“Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton.”

“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.”

“Now everyone leaking and tweeting and posting on everyone else is the acknowledged way to get ahead in the 21st century.”

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

“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.”

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

“Obama has figured out the best method to prepare the way for his verbal Houdini acts: Use political noise as the tune-up din before the aria. Perhaps his body temperature is so low, it sometimes takes him too long to break out the song.”

“Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that's no excuse.”

“Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre.”

“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.”

“Obama's stern demeanor punctuated by intermittent flashes of his wide, relaxing smile is his greatest weapon in defusing pent-up angst.”

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

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

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

“'Out of the box' corporate thinking helped carry real American innovation out in a box. A pine box.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Plenty of couples snipe at each other in sometimes embarrassing ways in front of company.”

“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.”

“Practices such as arranged marriages and restrictions on girls attending school have deep roots, and changing them is a gradual process. Sometimes these problems seem very far away from us here in the United States. But let's remember that even into the 20th century, an American woman could not own property or vote in national elections.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Servility always curdles into rage in the end.”

“Some weddings take longer to plan than others.”

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

“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.”

“The cloud that descended on Black Rock on Monday was not for the past but the future. How much will this debacle chill the pursuit of other risky investigations?”

“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.”

“'The Daily Beast' and Howard Kurtz have parted company.”

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

“The digital explosion has been so explosive.”

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

“The Duke of York has never remarried.”

“The first black president was a hotter plot line than the first woman president.”

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

“The most frequent thing people said to me about Princess Diana when I was conducting interviews for my biography was that she could create a circle of intimacy in the middle of a crowd.”

“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.”

“The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all. Everyone is under too much scrutiny now to take a chance on candidates who suddenly blow up into a comic meme, a punchline, a ribald hashtag.”

“The number one way of becoming powerful in Washington is by becoming the 'Washington Post.'”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“The vaults of Buckingham palace are groaning with priceless, useless freebies from foreign dignitaries.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“There is nobody more boring than the undefeated.”

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

“To people I know in the bottom income brackets, living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years. What's new is the way it's hit the demographic that used to assume that a college degree from an elite school was the passport to job security.”

“To win respect, the networks seem to feel they have to keep absurdly overstating their anchors' reporting cred.”

“Top doctors, I have come to believe, are as big a menace to your health as top money managers are to your bank account. They are almost never available to talk to.”

“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.”

“Unlike his predecessors, Obama is not big on 'Masterpiece Theatre' nostalgia.”

“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.”

“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.”

“'Vogue' celebrates plenty of women of substance.”

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

“Washington's Alfalfa Club dinner is a populist's nightmare.”

“We live in a culture of destructive transparency.”

“We've heard a lot in recent polemic about how to win the fight for the corner office. But pushing up against a glass ceiling is practically a luxury when you consider the millions of women who can feel the floor dropping beneath their feet.”

“What America is thirsting for now is a battalion of strong, down-to-earth 'doers' - managers, frontline activists, business and social entrepreneurs engaged in tackling America's manifold problems of unemployment, education, and competitive slouch.”

“What does it take to be a great social chronicler? Perhaps one of the key attributes is an understanding of what it feels like to fall from grace.”

“What has happened to America's survival instincts?”

“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.”

“When George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, the precious possession he brought with him from home was his personal feather pillow. The theme of the Bush years was obliviousness. He was famously unavailable for debate and dialogue. He was deaf to countervailing voices. He hit the sack early and always got a good night's sleep.”

“When I took over 'The New Yorker,' there was a very, very good, smart staff in place.”

“When Obama dispenses with that dread sobriquet 'professorial,' he does it by being, well, more professorial.”

“When Obama heralds another 'teachable moment,' it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.”

“Where did the inspiring Obama of the campaign go, that Facebook pied piper who friended the whole world with this update: 'Change you can believe in.' What happened to him?”

“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.”

“Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone's definition of an all-American girl - attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul?”

“'Wingnuts' is the first book bearing the imprint of Beast Books.”

“With so many part-time people on - and not on - the job, corporate America has started to feel like it's on a permanent maternity leave. Colleagues are an amorphous, free-floating army of rotating waifs whose voicemails are clogged with plaintive requests from their own offices for missing information.”

“'Worshipping in private,' as Obama does, comes off as just another form of annoying elitism.”

“You can get an interview with anyone overseas on the basis of being part of 'Newsweek.' It still has a great deal of impact.”

“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.”