Judy Woodruff Quotes

There are many things we can live without but a sense of humor is not one of them!

Girl Scouts offered a wonderful group of girls where common concerns and interests could come together. We could learn, be challenged, and support one another. It was a very positive aspect of my life and played an important role in shaping who I am today.

But I want to pay tribute to Anna Lee Woodruff, an extraordinary, selfless woman and beautiful grandmother who in her quiet determined way was a role model for her two daughters, and who left a lasting impression on so many who knew her.

If you spend enough time in or around Washington, you'll meet amazing people who work for the government.

At work, conversation increases productivity. And yet people go into work, put on their headphones. In one interview, somebody called it - they become pilots in their own cockpits.

I think we have reached such saturation levels, the money at this point doesn't swing election.

My job is to try and bring attention to places that don't have it

You can find inspiration when you're not even looking for it.

For the past 21 years, I've been privileged to be part of an amazing organization called the International Women's Media Foundation.

If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a President fresh from a war victory.

It's always unfortunate when a reporter is sent behind bars for failing to turn over sources. There's no way to say what the long-term outcome will be.

Is this administration, the Clinton administration, an administration that needed defending?

Politics is in my blood. I'd love to be involved in 2008, maybe even '06.

My younger sister retired a few years ago after a 30-year career teaching history and social studies at an inner-city high school.

It's very typical that when two people are having lunch, they put a phone on the table between them.

I think he [Vaclav Havel] probably would have liked to have written more plays. I think he missed being a playwright.I think he talked about wanting to write plays and keep appealing to people through that medium, rather than politics.

And I've been incredibly lucky to have a long career in journalism that has given me a front-row seat to some of the most important moments in modern American political life.

In some senses, I think it's almost deliberately anachronistic. There's a retro feel to the [Donald] Trump program.

This is naturally the most important thing, the dark traces left by the era of totalitarianism in the human mind, where is - are difficult to do away with. And this is a very demanding job.

As the mother of a grown son with a traumatic brain injury, I couldn't be more excited about the prospect of finding out how to repair even a small part of the damage that changed his life.

The sorts of sectors which feature so largely in the [Donald] Trump program, and its rhetoric, account now for perhaps only about 15 percent of the American work force.

I think that Election Day is the closest thing we have to a civic sacrament, when people meet their neighbors at the firehouse or the school and they vote at the same time.

I think he [Vaclav Havel] is one of the great figures of the 20th century. He is one of the people that was able to be a part of overthrowing a dictatorial system by talking to people and understanding what the elements of democracy really are and respect for each other and elevating.

Vaclav Havel had moral stature. The president in first Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic in many ways is a ceremonial role. And so, speaking out and having that strong moral fiber, people just knew that he told the truth to people who had only heard lies. And so I think his - that's his legacy.

The N-word is one of the most contentious words in the English language.

So many times, white - non-college-education - educated white males have voted Republican. They voted against their own economic interests because of guns, because of gays, and because of God, the three G's, God being the woman's right to choose.

I think, as a historian, what strikes one the most about this [Donald'd Trump] program is just simply its nationalism, with his commitment to the redevelopment of American manufacturing and industrial jobs, providing jobs for the constituency that was so important in electing him.

That is certainly the promise of [Donald Trump] campaign and the promise of his economic program.This economic program is really the pickup truck of economic programs. It's the Ford F-150 of economic programs. It's about manufacturing. It's about oil, fossil fuels. It's a deliberate, forceful reassertion of an image of American industrialism that we have inherited from the 20th century.

I don't think anyone is closer to the voters in Washington than members of the House of Representatives.

I think he [Vaclav Havel] felt that he could speak more truth, in a way, through writing plays.

I have no doubt about it. I think this is a part of the nature of man, a desire for freedom, for dignified life.

I knew that Vaclav Havel didn't want to look into people's eyes, because he said that, when he was being interrogated during the communist period and had been taken to jail, that, if you look directly into somebody's eyes, they can persuade you. And so you can see that so clearly in this interview, where he's looking down.And I kept saying to him as we kept coming - came over here: " You have to look up."And I clearly had no influence on him.

Vaclav Havel was the most amazing man in terms of being the combination of somebody with massive moral authority, great courage for having espoused the concepts of democracy, freedom throughout a very difficult communist period, a very modest man, and somebody with a fabulous sense of humor and the idea of being able to see the absurd in situations.

The system was afraid of Vaclav Havel. And so they either harassed him for put him in jail.

I think that, from Vaclav Havel own experience, he knew if we all paid attention to what was going on, the chances were that even the most horrible dictators wouldn't execute people.

Historically, when times are bad, voters, especially in the Industrial Midwest, have turned to the Democrats.

In the study, 89 percent of Americans said that they interrupted their last social encounter by looking at a phone. And 82 percent of them said that it deteriorated the conversation.

Of course, man is also a weak creature with many bad qualities. And it depends on which of his qualities will in a certain social situation and in a certain climate prevail, which qualities will awaken. The totalitarian system was masterful in how it managed to mobilize all the bad qualities.

If you're using technology in a way that opens out conversation in your family, with your friends, with people you care about, I'm for that. But if you're using technology to silence the conversations with the people around you, then you have to create sacred spaces in your home, the kitchen, the dining room, the car.

That's one of the surprises in the research, that's it's not young people who are smitten with their phones. It's their parents who are not paying attention to them.

Young people realize that something is amiss. There's a generation that fell in love with their phones, and it's very hard for them to see that there's a problem. But young people are desperate for the attention of their parents, who are really not paying attention to them.

Create sacred spaces in the workplace as well. Classrooms, five years ago, professors would say, I don't want be a nanny to my students. They can do whatever they want. Now professors are saying, put away that laptop, because studies show that it not only takes away the attention of the person who's on the laptop from the class, but everyone around them. There's like a circle around that person that's distracted and not paying attention.

Income tax in particular in the United States is concentrated on the top half of the income distribution, and very heavily skewed towards the top 10 or even top 1 percent.

I think one can see the [Donald] Trump program as if it were that element of the bailout of 2009 writ very large, and now extended out towards both fossil fuels, and, on the other hand, the infrastructure program, which is such a key element of the spending side of the Trump program.

United States military involvement in Syria has deepened since President Trump took office.

That was an exception within the [Barack] Obama administration's economic policy, a crisis that he inherited from the previous administration, and felt it was essential to carry through on.

What will be interesting to see is whether or not we see from the [Donald Trump] administration initiatives on higher education for this work force, because if those kinds of training opportunities are not provided, then I do think this program begins to look like a defensive holding action, a rear-guard action, buying time for workers who might not otherwise find positions in the 21st century.

President Trump say that relations between the United States and Russia may be at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

Almost all of us have wondered at one point or another about the taxes we pay: Where does the money go?

There are still very few companies run by women these days. And, clearly, there are many reasons for that, including what many see as the role of both unconscious bias and outright sexism.