NANCY GIBBS

I don't think it's necessary to shout if you have a good story. But I also don't think you should shy away from being bold in the statement that you're making.

I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' But Valentine's Day leaves me cold.

You can't predict when a crisis might hit your family, whether it's with an elderly parent or with your children.

We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.

Years later, nothing makes me more grateful as a parent than my daughters' encounters with classroom wizards.

People don't blame the act of driving for auto accidents.

In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.

As long as people have been making little people, they've wanted to know how not to.

On the court, Jason Collins is not a huge basketball star, but he has already claimed his place in civil rights history as the first openly gay athlete to play in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues.

In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright would baptize Obama, perform his marriage to Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, baptize their daughters, and draw him into the raucous, restless family of faith that Obama had never known before.

Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.

Some people are born strong or stretchy, or with a tungsten will.

Rand Paul does not like being compared to his father Ron any more than sons named Bush like to dance in their father's shadow, but the crucial difference is that while the Bushes all hail from the relative mainstream of the GOP, the Pauls have an ideological tributary virtually to themselves.

It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.

Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what's left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school.

Decision making in a democracy depends above all on knowledge and not just the intel available to presidents and policymakers.

The path of progress cuts through the four-way intersection of the moral, medical, religious and political - and whichever way you turn, you are likely to run over someone's deeply held beliefs.

Just because we eat together does not mean we eat right: Domino's alone delivers a million pizzas on an average day.

Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting.

I would like to see every newspaper and every magazine have a network of bureaus all over the world, gathering news.

There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.

Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.

It is faith that drives us to build, a belief that we cannot be limited by lack of nerve or airspace.

Whatever people thought the first time they held a portable phone the size of a shoe in their hands, it was nothing like where we are now, accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips.