Judy Woodruff quotes:

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

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.

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.

Raising children is a journey generously sprinkled with what many view as teachable moments, perhaps none as challenging as those surrounding faith and religion.

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.

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.

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

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.

My mother was adored by her family and by the scores of children she took care of and their parents, all of whom called her 'Miss Woody.'

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

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.

We decided to focus on women because no one was singling them out.

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.

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.

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

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

People put on their earphones, they lay out their phones, they put - open up their computers, and they convince themselves that they're most productive when they're focused on their e-mail, when, really, they're ignoring the cafeteria, the watercooler, the meetings with colleagues, the times when really the creativity, collaboration happens.

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

He was a lifelong Republican, but over the years, Harry Blackmun built a reputation as a liberal, sometimes defiant Justice, whose fierce protection of individual rights led some to anoint him the moral conscience of the court.

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

My mother was adored by her family and by the scores of children she took care of and their parents, all of whom called her 'Miss Woody.

Our phones do play to our natural nervousness about being vulnerable to each other, but that doesn't mean that we can't we can't pull ourselves together, and say - we need to talk to each because it's in conversation, the most human and humanizing thing that we do, that empathy is born, that intimacy is born, that relationship is born.

People want jobs, but nobody has a recipe for how to get them. And so they are trying different things.

There have been trade-offs every day, every month, every year. There's a lot that I missed and I do have regrets in that area. But I have been able to bring to my family the richness of being a journalist.

As the mother of a son with disabilities, I try to keep an eye out for news that affects people in the large community of which he is a part.

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.

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

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.

When I think of grass I think of something to walk on, pot as something to put a plant in.

Americans tend not to be too enthusiastic about having their taxes raised again....But if the American people aren't going to accept it, if the politicians don't have the courage to raise taxes, what are we facing down the road?

What we do have is a gigantic matching tax-cutting program as a way of stimulating the economy.

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

You have to be careful, because, in the [Donald] Trump stimulus package, there were two elements. One is the infrastructure investment program, which at this moment doesn't have the financing spelled out in any effective form.

Every news organization should ideally be as broadly representative as possible.

Some days you feel like you've had the greatest ego massage, then the next day you've been trampled on.

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

When it comes to economics, president-elect [Donald] Trump has promised to revive American manufacturing, get tough on trade with China, cut taxes and invest in infrastructure.

I mean, the 1930s are the birth moment of modern public sector, government-driven infrastructure spending.

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 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.

One can understand the politics of that at this moment. It's an effort to buy time for a constituency of workers who have really been suffering in the last 20 years, and who need to be prepared and be given time to prepare for a transition to a very different type of employment that we may moving on to in the coming decades.

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

There's no doubt that [tax cuts] act as a stimulus. How could they not, in a sense? You're giving cash back to households.

They have two aspects. One is that they're unpredictable, and that often rich and more affluent households are slow to spend the funds. The other thing about tax cuts is that they're redistributive. So they tend, naturally, to benefit those who pay tax.

More than half the U.S. population and more than half of the voters in this election were women. Among them, 42 percent voted for Donald Trump, 54 percent went for Hillary Clinton, essentially the reverse of how men voted.

There was a bridge to the 21st century, and yet, somehow, for very large number of Americans, it was unclear how you got from one place to the other, from being a manual working-class man to being some part of a Brooklyn-based sharing economy.

I think the niche, the gap which Donald Trump program fills is one which previous Democratic administrations, for all their futuristic embrace of globalization...

What I think the appeal of the [Donald] Trump program has been is that it offers some kind of concrete, specific, historically rooted, a familiar image of how ordinary Americans, regular Americans can earn their living.

The vast majority of Americans are employed in service sector industries, and many of those sectors are highly internationalized. The most high-value added sectors, notably the tech sector, is massively globalized. And, for them, it would be a disaster if America's trade policy was to go down a spiraling route towards protectionism.

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.

A dramatic unwinding of that relationship [between USA and China], by way of an aggressive trade policy, is one of the nightmare scenarios for the global economy as a whole, because it would result in a spiraling depreciation of the dollar, a surge in American interests rates, a collapse in the market for American government debt.

Viewing that complex relationship one-sidedly from the aspect of manufacturing and the impact of Chinese imports on the United States makes sense from the point of view of the Rust Belt of the United States. It may even make sense as a political strategy for a candidate running for office.

If you stimulate the economy by means of a tax cut, the people that you tend to be benefiting are the better off.

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.

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 think even Republicans are saying [Andrew] Puzder may have a problem.

The heyday perhaps of American public infrastructure is the Sputnik moment of the 1950s, the [Dwaight] Eisenhower administration, for instance, which rolls out the modern interstate system. The highway system of the United States is built during this period.

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.

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.

Vaclav Havel was a really popular leader. He couldn't believe that he was really there. I mean, he still dressed in black T-shirts and jeans and was very kind of '60s. And he began to realize the seriousness of it. And he knew how to strategize. And he had a very keen political sense, but he didn't want to be like the old communist leaders.

Vaclav Havel didn't want to ride around in big black cars. And he had his own car with a little red heart on it. And he loved to go out and talk to the people.

Vaclav Havel had this great sense of humor. And you kind of felt that he was making a little bit fun of everything at the same time.

He [Vaclav Havel] did love music. And so much about the Czech revolution was about music.

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.

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.

From one perspective, we're in the early stage in artificial intelligence, but exponentials start out slowly, and then they take off.

The primary implication is that we're going to combine our intelligence with computers. We're going to make ourselves smarter. By the 2030s, they will literally go inside our bodies and inside our brains.

Machines are on track to be on par with human intelligence in less than 15 years.

The field of artificial intelligence is pushing new boundaries.

A.I. poses a potential threat more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

You may not realize it, but artificial intelligence is all around us.

CD4 being the level of the lymphocyte that indicates the level of your immune function.

A definitive decision to say you should start people on therapy as soon as you know they're infected.

There's no embassy for the United States in Iran. So, Iranians process those in other countries.

AFSCME stands for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Senate races are different from House races, in the sense that they are more candidate-driven. The higher the office - that is, I mean, governor, senator, president - the more important the candidate.

Election Day now has become the last day to vote.

Now it's become sort of a - you know, just sort of a casual thing, and you can vote any time at all. It doesn't increase turnout. It hasn't increased turnout, really. And I don't think it's a healthy development. I sound like an old fogey here.

I think it's important that campaigns be aired all the way through, that people aren't voting three weeks before, before debates are held.

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.

In my book ["Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age], I argue that we're vulnerable to technologies.There's a 40 percent decline in all markers for empathy among college students, with most of it taking place in the past years.

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

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.

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.

All the research shows that the presence of that phone will do two things to the conversation. It will make the conversation go to trivial matters, and it will decrease the amount of empathy that the two people in the conversation feel toward each other. That phone is a signal that either of us can put our attention elsewhere.

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

In 2008, the Democrats made a great effort among African-American voters, and they did increase their turnout considerably, and among Latino voters.

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

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.

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.

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

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 there's a fundamental moral issue about whether it's right for a machine to decide to kill a person. It's bad enough that people are deciding to kill people, but at least they have perhaps some moral argument that they're doing it to ultimately defend their families or prevent some greater evil.

One of the main things we have been looking at is, how can we get a robot to think about situations it's never seen before?

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

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

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.