Jill Abramson Quotes

I have heard Obama officials say more than once, 'You will have blood on your hands if you publish this story.'

The press are the representative of the people and they have a right to know, but they don’t have the right to know right now…. There is an art to telling the truth slowly.

From your confessor, lawyer and physician, hide not your case on no condition.

Oh, well, there's a difference between privacy and secrecy.

No one knows who is listening, say nothing you would not wish put in the newspapers.

As a child, I always enjoyed - my parents used to have these little cocktail parties - and I always loved trying to get the adults to tell me things they weren't supposed to say. And in many ways, that's what my job is today; it's getting people to tell me things that they probably are otherwise not supposed to say.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

I am shocked by the easy attitude of many in the media towards disclosing our Nation's secrets.

Things can’t be kept secret forever.

It is not a secret if it is known by three people.

All truths are not to be told.

To Any Officer or Employee of the Government: Please tell Mr. Lincoln Steffens anything whatever about the government that you know (not incompatible with the public interest) and provided only that you tell him the truth—no matter what it might be—I will see to it that you are not hurt. T. Roosevelt.

Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them.

I'm not convinced that every secret has to be published. I think there are secrets worth keeping, and I think there are secrets not worth keeping.

It's in the DNA of Scientology that they don't trust journalists.

My motivation for 20 years, for 10 years with WikiLeaks, has been to publish true information that is otherwise unsayable. So we're not in competition, if you like.

It's only gossip if you repeat it. Until then, it's gathering information.

Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, that’s not journalism. That's gossip. Journalism was invented as an antidote to gossip.

Journalism is an act of faith in the future.

He who guards his secrets retains control in his own hands

Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That's why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.

To newspapers and publishing houses I urge the use of fact over fiction, freedom of the press, and responsibility at all times.

We all have secrets. We've all kept secrets. We've had secrets kept from us, and we know how that feels.

It is often wise to reveal that which cannot be concealed for long.

While many people think that we as reporters are whining and that this is a time of war, we are really the conveyors of truth in a very critical time and people need to know that truth.