A Quote by Hillary Clinton

When I traveled as secretary of state, I was deluged with thick briefing books full of information about the politics, economy, and culture of each destination, so those took up most of my reading time.
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.
Most of the time what I am reading is leadership books, books on the mind and a lot of deep stuff about spiritual stuff and Christian stuff. So most of my free time is spent reading. I try to read 1-to-2 books a month.
I was reading books about the Nazi presence not only in Argentina, but all over Latin America, and time and after time this information would come up.
Secretary Clinton should be denied access to classified information. Congress must also hold the State Department accountable for fixing the culture of lax handling of classified information.
I care deeply about women's rights. I have been an outspoken advocate for them for many years and as secretary of state I carried that message around the world because empowering women, providing for women's rights, their full participation in society, politics, the economy is not only a matter of individuals being able to chart their own futures. It's good for democracy and it's good for peace and prosperity.
I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service - each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train.
I've traveled to the most glamorous places in the world, the biggest capitals of culture, and I've traveled to the biggest fuddy-duddy, slum life nowheresvilles... so I've seen a ton of stuff. I've been physically attacked at a McDonald's in Perth, Australia, in full drag.
Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page.
I can learn a lot from reading briefing books and talking to experts, but that pales in comparison to what I can learn from going out and talking to people about what they're actually experiencing and hearing about their ideas.
We live in such a celebrity-driven culture, but all those people have to go buy toilet paper, and all those people have products they use and their favorite sweet treats. They all have to write to-do lists, and they're all reading books - well, hopefully most people are doing those things.
To travel best requires some time preparing for your visit to a particular location - that you don't travel anywhere without spending a few nights reading about the culture and history of the place you are visiting. This is what most of us don't do - we fling ourselves on an exotic destination hoping that someone will tell us what we are looking at, but by that time it's too late, and all the lectures and tour guides simply add to our confusion.
I read books when I was a kid, lots of books. Books always seemed like magic to me. They took you to the most amazing places. When I got older, I realized that I couldn't find books that took me to all of the places I wanted to go. To go to those places, I had to write some books myself.
There is a wonderful book called "Gandhi's Truth," by Erik Erikson, the psychologist. It is a great book. And I remember reading that and thinking about this connection between what we think in our personal lives and how that manifests itself in our politics. Those are two books, just off the top, that I think are sort of representative of reading that I did at that time. I never get a chance to read anymore.
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