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• HAVING GREAT EFFECT OR INFLUENCE

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Synonyms of importance

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Thesaurus Definition of importance

Synonyms & Similar Words

• significance
• consequence
• momentousness
• weightiness
• seriousness
• preeminence
• distinction
• noteworthiness
• essentiality
• substantiveness
• essentialness
• illustriousness

Antonyms & Near Antonyms

• insignificance
• worthlessness
• valuelessness

Synonym Chooser

How does the noun importance differ from other similar words?

Some common synonyms of importance are consequence , moment , significance , and weight . While all these words mean "a quality or aspect having great worth or significance," importance implies a value judgment of the superior worth or influence of something or someone.

When can consequence be used instead of importance ?

The words consequence and importance can be used in similar contexts, but consequence generally implies importance because of probable or possible effects.

In what contexts can moment take the place of importance ?

The words moment and importance are synonyms, but do differ in nuance. Specifically, moment implies conspicuous or self-evident consequence.

When would significance be a good substitute for importance ?

While the synonyms significance and importance are close in meaning, significance implies a quality or character that should mark a thing as important but that is not self-evident and may or may not be recognized.

When is weight a more appropriate choice than importance ?

The synonyms weight and importance are sometimes interchangeable, but weight implies a judgment of the immediate relative importance of something.

Examples of importance in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'importance.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Thesaurus Entries Near importance

Cite this entry.

“Importance.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/importance. Accessed 14 Aug. 2024.

More from Merriam-Webster on importance

Nglish: Translation of importance for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of importance for Arabic Speakers

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• most important

adjective as in foremost

Weak matches

• A number one
• at the cutting edge
• at the leading edge
• heavy stuff
• heavyweight

Example Sentences

They also ran the second-most important ad of the season, painting Quinn as a creature of a smoky backroom.

Now we come to the, for you, most-important subject of mixtures of colours and their effects.

Related Words

Words related to most important are not direct synonyms, but are associated with the word most important . Browse related words to learn more about word associations.

adjective as in first in rank, order

From Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.

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• CAREER COLUMN
• 14 August 2024

Chatbots in science: What can ChatGPT do for you?

• Milton Pividori 0

Milton Pividori is a biomedical-informatics researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Milton Pividori has explored how best to use AI chatbots to improve science. Credit: Kerkhoff Photography & Design

ChatGPT stunned the world on its launch in November 2022. Powered by a large language model (LLM) and trained on much of the text published on the Internet, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, makes the latest advances in natural-language processing broadly accessible by providing a dialogue-based interface capable of answering complex questions, composing sophisticated essays and generating source code. One obvious question was: how could this tool improve science?

Article collection: Science and the new age of AI

Over the past 18 months, with funding from the non-profit organizations Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in Redwood City, California, my laboratory has been exploring ways to incorporate the technology into daily tasks, such as conducting literature reviews, revising and writing scholarly text and programming code. Our goal is to assess how we can safely use this technology to produce better science and increase productivity. Here, we highlight some key lessons.

Engineer your prompt

To use a chatbot effectively, you need a good prompt. That might sound obvious, but some of my colleagues still get frustrated and give up when the tool fails to answer a poorly articulated question. This is understandable: the public has been bombarded with the idea that these models are ‘intelligent’, so it makes sense to think that they should understand whatever you ask. But this isn’t true, which is why prompt engineering has become a fast-growing discipline in the field.

There are a lot of nuances to good prompt design, but the basic principles are simple:

• Be clear about what you want the model to do (use commands such as ‘Summarize’ or ‘Explain’).

• Ask the model to adopt a role or persona (‘You are a professional copy editor’).

• Provide examples of real input and output, potentially covering tricky ‘corner’ cases, that show the model what you want it to do.

• Specify how the model should answer (‘Explain it to someone who has a basic understanding of epigenetics’) or even the exact output format (for instance, as an analysis-friendly JSON or CSV file).

• Optionally, specify a word limit, whether the text should use the active or passive voice, and any other requirements. Check out the ‘ Prompt Engineering Cheat Sheet ’ for more tips.

Three ways ChatGPT helps me in my academic writing

Here is a prompt that we use to revise manuscript abstracts, which we crafted on the basis of guidelines 1 published in 2017.

You are a professional copy editor with ample experience handling scientific texts. Revise the following abstract from a manuscript so that it follows a context–content–conclusion scheme. (1) The context portion communicates to the reader the gap that the paper will fill. The first sentence orients the reader by introducing the broader field. Then, the context is narrowed until it lands on the open question that the research answers. A successful context section distinguishes the research’s contributions from the current state of the art, communicating what is missing in the literature (that is, the specific gap) and why that matters (that is, the connection between the specific gap and the broader context). (2) The content portion (for example, ‘here, we ...’) first describes the new method or approach that was used to fill the gap, then presents an executive summary of results. (3) The conclusion portion interprets the results to answer the question that was posed at the end of the context portion. There might be a second part to the conclusion portion that highlights how this conclusion moves the broader field forward (for example, ‘broader significance’).

Find the right tasks

When considering potential applications, ask yourself how much creativity the task requires, and what could happen if the model steers you wrong. What are the aspects of the task that only a person could contribute, and which are more mechanical — and usually, boring?

Take the literature-review stage of a research project, for instance. The goal of this iterative process is to produce a refined list of articles with a summary of their main ideas. This sounds like the perfect task for a chatbot assistant, and it is — but not at first. Defining a research question involves creative thinking; you need to read papers carefully, identify research gaps, develop a hypothesis and start thinking about how you could address the problem experimentally. You probably want to understand as much as you can about each paper, including its figures, tables and supplementary materials. A chatbot might omit key information and, importantly, could prevent you from drawing creative and logical connections.

Milton Pividori and his collaborators developed a tool that integrates ChatGPT edits into the collaborative-writing tool Manubot. Credit: Milton Pividori and Casey S. Greene

Later in the process, however, your goals will be different. At this point, you might want to quickly ‘read’ (that is, summarize) articles that are less directly related to your work. In this case, using a chatbot assistant is less risky.

Our team has found some success using specialized tools (such as SciSpace ) to search for articles, assess their relevance and ‘chat’ with the text. But general tools, such as ChatGPT, have been less useful. Whichever platform you choose, use standard search engines as well, to maximize the number of relevant papers that you find.

Write more, read less

In my experience, using a chatbot to write is less risky than using it to read. To have an LLM ‘read’ a paper, you have to trust it to accurately extract the most important points, because you might not read the article yourself. But when using it to write, you have complete control over the output and can catch ‘hallucinations’ — text that is nonsensical or inaccurate — when they occur.

When I start writing a manuscript, I already know what I want to say, but I often need help with crafting the text. In this case, it’s useful to feed the chatbot the rules for structuring a scientific manuscript in your discipline 1 . As an alternative, you can write without help at first, and then use a chatbot to revise the text (for example, to apply the context–content–conclusion structure to a paragraph), review its suggestions and implement the good ones. When I was a postdoc, my colleagues and I developed an AI editor for the collaborative-writing framework Manubot . The editor takes a human-centric approach to automating the writing process 2 : a person first writes the text, the LLM revises their work and then the author reviews the changes. The tool uses the version-control service GitHub to keep track of which portions of the text were contributed by the user and which by the model — this can be important to document, considering that at least one contributor to Nature has been falsely accused of using a chatbot to write their manuscript.

‘Obviously ChatGPT’ — how reviewers accused me of scientific fraud

When writing source code with a chatbot, you can take a similar approach: ask the LLM for code either to solve a problem or fix existing, buggy code. If you know what you want your code to do (the creative part), you’ll need to write a prompt to instruct the model which language and libraries to use (the mechanical part). Then, you run the code to see whether it works. The worst that will happen is that the code produces the wrong outcome or conveys the wrong conclusion. You need to check the code carefully, even if you get what seems to be the right answer — and for that, you need to understand it.

This is a key point, especially for trainees: if you don’t know how to do something, I strongly discourage you from using a chatbot to do it for you.

As LLMs become increasingly capable, they can help scientists to focus on the creative and challenging aspects of their work and offload the less intellectually stimulating parts. The challenge is identifying those tasks that only humans can do — and recognizing the limitations that LLMs still pose.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02630-z

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged .

Mensh, B. & Kording, K. PLoS Comput. Biol. 13 , e1005619 (2017).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Pividori, M. & Greene, C. S. J. Am. Med. Inf. Assoc . https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocae139 (2024).

Article   Google Scholar  

Download references

Competing Interests

The University of Colorado filed the US Patent Application for the ‘Academic Editing Engine(s) For Attribution And Revision Of Scholarly Authoring’ invention with the US Patent and Trademark Office. M.P. is one of the inventors in this patent.

M.P. received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (G-2023-20989) supporting the research underlying this work.

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The Ezra Klein Show

Nancy Pelosi: ‘It Didn’t Sound Like Joe Biden to Me’

By Ezra Klein

Nancy Pelosi on Joe Biden, Tim Walz and Donald Trump

The remarkable thing about the past couple of months in politics has been watching the Democratic Party act like something we have not seen for a long time — a political party. A party that makes decisions collectively. A party that does hard things because it wants to win. A party that is more than the vehicle for a single — usually — man’s ambitions.

But parties are made of people. And in this case, the party was in particular made of a person, Nancy Pelosi, one of the longest-serving House speakers, the first female speaker, and — it sometimes feels — one of the last people left in American politics who knows how to wield power and knows why she wants to do so.

The former Speaker of the House discusses the election and the art of power.

The remarkable thing about the past couple of months in politics has been watching the Democratic Party act like something we have not seen for a long time a political party, a party that makes decisions collectively, a party that does hard things because it wants to win. A party that is more than the vehicle for a single, usually man’s ambitions. But parties are made of people. And in this case, the party was in particular made of a person. Nancy Pelosi, one of the longest serving speakers, the first female Speaker of the House, and one of the. It sometimes feels like last people left in American politics. Who knows how to wield power. And knows why she wants to wield power. She’s a new book coming out. The art of power. And she came by the times to talk about what she has learned. Why she does what she does and how she sees this moment in American politics. Nancy Pelosi. Welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. So we’re talking on the day that Vice President Harris named Tim Walz as her vice presidential pick in the campaign. He served with you in the house. He is the first former member of the house to be on a ticket since Al Gore on a Democratic ticket, at least. What was he like in the house. What can you tell us about him to help us get to know him better. It was remarkable. In the house, he came winning a Republican seat. So he was a red to blue candidate and he came as the longest serving, non-commissioned officer in the military to ever to serve in the Congress. So he was on a path of Veterans Affairs and the rest. He came as a child who had worked in farming as a child. And so that the rural America was a big priority for him. And so when I hear people talking about what a liberal is, I’m like, wait a minute, this is not the same person. He was right down the middle. And just as getting off the elevator, I got a message from his classmates. They’re having a Zoom event for a fundraiser for him, which they were happy to invite me to his house classmates, classmates. He’s very popular in the house, very popular in the house. Members are so excited about him because he’s a wonderful person, just normal, lovely, wonderful guy. But let me just say, he called me right after this, shall we say, opportunity arose. I know how to go out. I know how to make this case. I know how to differentiate. I can get this done. I’m putting myself out there and Who’d thunk it. Here he is, Governor of Minnesota and he’s putting himself out there. And then he comes up with weird, which becomes viral and the rest. And here he is. So I have to give him a lot of credit for not only being a great governor. And values based and visionary. And all that, but being quite an adept politician. Experience is a governor is very prized presidentially. People talk about executive experience. People talk about experience. In the Senate. Joe Biden was partially on the ticket with Obama due to his background in the Senate. What do you learn in the House that you don’t learn from being a governor or being a Senator. The governor is a different story. That’s an administrative management experience that is different. And we’re very proud that we have so many. If you read my book, you don’t see too much, shall we say, patience with a Senator and a Senator and a Senator and a Senator and a Senator, because what they do, they bring their staff, their staff, their staff. And there’s such a Senate centric attitude toward what can pass the Senate. Well, we’re a bandwagon. They’re a convoy. So I’m glad to see somebody with the House experience going into the executive branch. You make the argument in the book that members of the House are more retail oriented than members of Senate. I think that’s. So what do you mean by that. Well, I mean that they are. We have to run every two years, so we’re close. And that has our founders intended that we would be close to the people they employ every six years. It’s a whole different story. Not that not that we don’t value them and what they bring to it and all that, but ours is, shall we say, a little more rough and tumble, a little more impatience to get things done and a little more closeness to the constituents, our bosses, we consider them our bosses. One of the ways Walz has changed the campaign quickly is the injection of the word and the idea of weirdness into it, and that ended up flavoring how I read some of your book because you have a very funny chapter actually on Donald Trump that is largely about him being very weird in conversations with you. So what have you thought about first the bringing of weirdness as an attack into the campaign. And two, how well does it describe your experience of Trump and the Republicans who followed him. I mean, we’re as weird, but wrong is even different. It’s a good word. I mean, it’s on the path. But I think that dangerous is probably. But it’s not, shall we say, appealing a word. It sounds confrontational, but I think they’re very dangerous. It strikes me that one reason it’s connected in the way it has is that it is deflating. I think in many ways, Joe Biden often wanted Trump’s threat to be the center of the campaign. And this feels like an interesting inversion. It’s about making them smaller, pushing them more to the side, grabbing hold of normalcy, not making them into a sort of unstoppable supervillain. Well, to that end. One of the things that my understanding is that Trump does not like to be laughing. Said and this made people laugh at them. The weird thing is they’re dangerous. He’s very weird. People laughed and they don’t like to be laughed at. That’s why he had a thing about me because I was making people laugh at him. So I was struck. So JD Vance, his initial attack on walls was that walls is a San Francisco style liberal. I happen to talk with walls a week ago and he told me that he had actually just been to San Francisco for the first time a few weeks ago. But it got me thinking. So you’re a San Francisco liberal and you were a very, very successful speaker of the House, Kamala Harris, a San Francisco politician, Vice President, now the presumptive nominee, Gavin Newsom, a San Francisco politician. Yeah got himself sort of has become a real national Democrat in a way I wouldn’t even have expected a couple of years ago. San Francisco actually has a pretty strong record right now of training politicians who become national figures, who seem quite adept in power at throwing a punch or taking a punch. And it’s like the list could go on right now. Ro Khanna, who’s outside San Francisco by a bit but has become an important nationalized figure. I think Scott Wiener in San Francisco has become a very influential figure. La politicians haven’t been playing as much at such a national level, and you could look at a lot of different cities across the country that don’t seem to be generating as many national figures. Well, I could name them quite a few other people, even more prominent than us who came out of or anybody you named who came out of San Francisco. We had Liam McCarthy, who was the speaker, Willie Brown, who was the speaker, George Moscone, who was the president pro tem. But Leo then became Lieutenant Governor, but he aspired to be the Senator and Dianne Feinstein, of course. But so why is San Francisco trained so many politicians to be so adept at wielding both power and media. Well, it’s all about the why. Why are you even into this. It’s a place that is an intellectual resource, whether we’re talking about saving the planet, whether you’re talking about LGBTQ rights, whether you’re talking about a woman’s right to choose, you name any subject, and there is a bedrock of support for it. And again, intellectual resource as well as strategic thinking about how to get things done. It’s highly educated in the whole region, a beautiful, beautifully diverse in terms of people who are there. And we have every religion or none. We have every political thought or whatever, and a lot of success, but a lot of need, a lot of need. So it’s again, a challenge to conscience the intellectual resource, the universities, Cal Stanford, University of San Francisco and all of that as a resource to it. So when it comes to the politics, it’s a network of allegiances and it’s not easy. I mean, it’s competitive and their loyalties and their loyalties. And so you have to get through all of that. And look at Kamala. Kamala, she ran against her boss, the incumbent. I was actually for him because he was for me and his family. The Hallinan family was a major, major Democratic Progressive family. And she ran against him. She won. So she had courage. She had courage to go forward. And then when she ran for attorney general, it was a very tough race. It was a massive primary. But she figured out a way. So when people talk about it, I said what, she’s not only a person of deep faith, which I personally admire in her and her commitment to public service. Officially, she’s strong. She knows what she cares about and she fights for it. Most recently, we see with the women’s right to choose and other issues. And politically, she’s astute, but you don’t realize it. But when you see she got to be district attorney, she got to be attorney general which was tough. That was a tough race. Very close. And she got to be vice president. And as soon as there was an opportunity, we thought there could be an open opportunity if people wanted to run and they could have. But she locked it down right away. Tell me about how she did that. She coalesced the party very rapidly. Yeah, well, I think here’s the thing. The thought was that if this were to happen, but it happened fast, we ain’t none of us had any idea he would do it that Sunday. Well, I didn’t have any idea. Most people didn’t. So when he did that and endorsed her, then the thought was everybody wanted an open process. Let’s see the talent, let’s see the bench of the Democrats and let them come. And see what they can attract. But when he endorsed her, then it was. Are you with me or not. And she moved quickly. She really moved quickly. And again, a sign of her adroitness in terms of being politically astute. So every step of the way, except for her race for president, which enabled her to be vice president, that wasn’t a success per se, but it led to it. So it was more the appetite that people had to win. I mean, my whole thing in all of this is our goal is to make sure that Donald Trump never steps foot in the White House because he’s beyond weird. I won’t go into all the adjectives. When you make a decision about your goal, you have to make every decision in favor of reaching that goal. But the most important part of the decision is the candidate and the campaign. And it didn’t seem as if there was a campaign in place and it was discouraging to people. So that decision about the campaign or per se, the person was the critical thing. And when that changed, then people who had been discouraged were overwhelmingly I mean, just overwhelmingly watching the pent up energy express itself has been something amazing. It’s beautiful to behold. And my members see the members, I call them my members still, but the members were so down and then they became not that they were losing. They and our Thanks to Suzan DelBene, our chair and the leadership there, they were in good shape. If Joe Biden lost by 5 points in their district, but not if he lost by 7. And so they weren’t desperate. But when this changed, it made such volunteers small donor contributions, just a whole different thing. Now we have to sustain it. There was a sort of remarkable feel for the timing of different things throughout that process, I want to quote from your book that caught my eye. This is about how you are a speaker and you say that the speaker, quote, you must demonstrate a plan and you must act without hesitation. The minute you hesitate, your options are diminished. The longer you wait, the more your options are diminished. Tell me about that principle. Well, the thing is that if you’re the leader what I make before that, I think or maybe in the course of that, I make the comparison with being a member of Congress. You have you can be deductive, study it, learn it, hearings, constituent meetings, this or this. But sometimes when you’re the leader or the speaker or an executor like the President of the United States or a governor, you have to act intuitively. And the minute you hesitate, you hesitate. I’m going to make get my agenda for red cups and then the other one is going to get their agenda for that thing. And everybody starts acting to protect their interest, which reduces your success. You have to act 9 out of 10 times. You’ll be right. That’s not a bad average. Maybe 9 out of 10 times you’ll be right. I’m not sure we all have that average. Well, you have to know. You have to know yourself. They say trust your gut. Well, what’s your gut. Unless you know what you’re talking about. The appetite of the voters and this or that you have listened. You don’t start listening that day. You might take a quick tally to make sure everybody knows the direction you’re going in. But I completely subscribe to you act, you’ll prevail. And they know you’re going to act so they won’t mess with you. I mean, I should say it in a nicer way than that. They know you’re going to act. They might curb their enthusiasm until another time. But when people believe you’re going to act, it changes their strategy. It does. They want to negotiate for another day. And that’s always the leverage to they have leverage. You have leverage because they may want something another day. You did something over the past couple of weeks, month that I actually found in a way. I don’t usually find strategic movements sort of remarkable and inexplicable. And I’m not going to ask you about anything you did or didn’t do in private. I want to be delicate about this, but July 8, Joe Biden sent a letter to members of Congress and he said the debate about me running is over. I’m running. I was voted for by 14 million people in the Democratic primary. Are you trying to take away their voice. We’re done with this. Two days later, you went on Morning Joe. It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short. I’ve been having House Democrats text me all that day before they said it’s over. It’s a Fait accompli. He’s quelled this. You walked out and reopened the space for deliberation by saying something in a way didn’t make logical sense. He had made his decision. Tell me about that language that how did that then everybody else picked up your template. We’re waiting for him to make that decision. Where did that come from. Well, I wanted to see a campaign that could win because I had made a decision that I stayed in Congress to defeat what’s his name because I think he is a danger to our country. It’s not like a Bob Dole or a George Bush or something like that. We have a difference of opinion. It’s patriotism or. No autocracy or democracy. It’s a different thing. I actually was on that show because I was bringing Svetlana so that people could hear about Belarus. That was our main purpose that morning of. I didn’t accept the letter as anything but a letter. I mean. And there are some people who are unhappy with the letter. Let me say it differently. Some said that some people were unhappy with the letter. Put it in somebody else’s mouth because it was AI mean, it didn’t sound like Joe Biden to me. It really didn’t. But people my main purpose, though, as it was to say, stop saying things because he has NATO here. If you have something to say, save it for later until they’re gone, because this is a big deal. The summit of NATO, which he has strengthened, grown and now is hosting and they’re doing great things and he’s the center of it all. Save your comments for later. But the thing that was happening in that moment was that as time was moving forward, the space for options was diminishing. That’s what it felt like to everybody watching this, covering it to people inside it. And you flip that. Yeah and reopen the question of deliberation, right. I mean, as you said, you said, let’s talk about this again after NATO and that it’s like you put a wedge in a door that somebody was trying to slam closed and every time you slammed it, it just sort of popped back open a little bit. I’ve actually seen you do this a few times. I’ve covered politics with you at the center of it for long enough. I remember watching you do this with the Affordable Care Act a number of times after Scott Brown won that Senate seat, Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, and it felt like the bill was collapsing. And you have a sort of tendency when a thing is beginning to fall apart, to simply assert that it isn’t, and to reopen people’s imagination about the options. You talk about that in terms of intuition, but how do when something is breaking and how do when it can actually be held together in those two cases, maybe. Well, I see everything as an opportunity. No matter what it is, it’s an opportunity, an opportunity for change, an opportunity to grow whatever it is. So when we did the Affordable Care Act. And they were like, now you’re dead. We are not passing up an opportunity of a generation that people have been trying to do, presidents have been trying to do for hundreds years. So this is after Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts. For people who don’t remember this, Ted Kennedy dies. He dies. Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts. And I covered the Affordable Care Act very, very closely. And it fell to people like it was going to die that the message a lot of Democrats took off of Scott Brown’s win was this is politically lethal. And for many, it ultimately was, at least at that period, and we should abandon it. We’ve gone too far. They were getting yelled at in town halls, and the feeling was that you pulled that back from the brink. Well, let me tell you. So when the Senate Bill, which was a real stinkeroo, I mean, there was no way we were going to vote for it. But finally they passed. At least they had a vehicle and we had our vehicle and we were going to go to conference and we’re all set to go to conference like the next day after the election. you’re dead. But the conference that we were engaged in prepared us for what we would put in reconciliation. So I knew we had reconciliation. So we didn’t need 60, but we needed to have something that our House Democrats would vote for. So the consensus that was built in conference prepared us for something that we could do in reconciliation and pass because there was no way. Yeah, but you needed to stiffen your members to pass even that. A lot of them wanted to flee. No, they didn’t want to pass it at all. I said, it stinks because see what we had to do, which was worse because of reconciliation, which is weird. It’s very weird. It’s weird. It’s the thing is the strangest way to do legislation. The president, they all kept saying to me, just pass the Senate Bill. I said, I wouldn’t even vote for that thing, much less bring it up. And my members are not voting for it. It’s a terrible bill. You have missed an opportunity and you don’t have things in there that you should. But I don’t vote for a bill for what it doesn’t have but I’m not voting for it. If I don’t like what it does have. But then it came to us and this was horrible, horrible. But you roll. They said, the parliamentarian says that you cannot pass your bill, the Senate Bill, and add your amendments until this bill is signed into law. My God. That meant I had to go to the members and say that stinking, lousy, rotten nothing bill from the Senate. We’re going to have to vote for it. So it gets signed into law. Then Harry gets these passed, we stick it here and then we have a victory you can’t make. What I hate the bill. I told the president I have nothing, that it’s a missed opportunity. But President was on the line. Harry Reid was on the line. And I was on the line and they voted for the stinking, lousy bill that I was never going to bring up, that I was never going to vote for, but we had to do it. And then we have the success that we went out there for Mr Speaker, I yield the balance of our time to the gentlewoman from. I yield one minute. The gentlewoman from California, who has led the way in this quest for health care reform, tirelessly, persistently, she has brought us to this moment of decision. The gentlelady from California, the Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi. Thank you, my colleagues. After a year of debate and hearing the calls of millions of Americans, we have come to this historic moment. Today, we have the opportunity to complete the great unfinished business of our society and pass health insurance reform for all Americans. That is a right and not a privilege. I was sorry we never could get because the Senate wouldn’t do it. Public option would have saved us money and but we couldn’t get it. But we put provisions in the bill that compensated for that. So it wasn’t so bad, but it wasn’t as good as it could be. But the reconciliation piece, I guess they just didn’t think we would do. I don’t know what they thought, but we were not going to pass the bill. And President always stuck with us. I’m not saying all these people did, but the president always he was one. There are people in the White House who thought it was time to time to cut bait, go for go for a mini bill. Who are they thinking. Don’t run for office yourself. I mean this. You ain’t going to happen. You got that. It’s not going to happen. Before you were in Congress, you were the state chair of the California Democratic Party. I thought I was the queen of the world, the biggest party in the country, grassroots organizing, owning the ground with your message, developing the candidates. My God, it was heaven. But you’re a party person, which not everybody is these days. One of the most remarkable things to me about watching covering the Democratic Party over the past couple of months has been watching it do something collectively in very difficult, uncertain circumstances. I was sitting with a Republican, a significant sort of experienced Republican, and I was asking him, why were they so surprised by the switch. Why was there so little talk of Kamala Harris at the Republican convention. And he said, we never thought they would do it. The Democrat, the Democratic Party has held together as an organization, an institution in recent years, not just in the past couple of months. And the Republicans haven’t. Look at the speakers on the Republican side. How many of them have been deposed, rendered powerless, their lives made miserable. John Boehner left whisper whistling zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Yeah tell me about how you have kept Democrats thinking and acting like a party, how you’ve empowered them to do that, and maybe how they’ve empowered you to act with power inside the party that they gave me. Well, here’s the thing. As I say, in the book, there are two things. One is I see myself as a Weaver at a loom and we have all these members and the beautiful diversity, 70 percent of our caucus are women, people of color, LGBTQ. That’s not the only diversity. It’s geographic. It’s generational. It’s everything you can think of. It’s philosophical philosophy and the rest. But they all know that why there are Democrats. So you have to know your why. Otherwise, what are you what are you doing that they know why they’re Democrats and some of the ones that might seem the most close to the edge in terms of a vote are the last ones who would become Republicans because they know what the Republicans are or aren’t. And you make everybody know that what I’m weaving here depends on all of you treating each one of you respect. Every thread makes a mosaic, a tapestry that is so beautiful. And we you’re part of that. So if we are not unanimous on something, that’s O.K. Just as long as we have the consensus to proceed. So you may not be part of the unanimity on any given or even part of the consensus, but respect it because tomorrow is another day. And your issue something you’re more interested in regionally, whatever it is, and that tapestry will be there for you. But that should be true for Republicans, right. It should be true for Republicans that the shifting coalitions benefit them over time. It should be true for Republicans that they have interests that weave in and out. It has become less true. The range of motion for Kevin McCarthy. If you don’t believe in governance, that’s what holds it together for Democrats. And you don’t believe in science. If science tells us we have to do this to protect the planet and we need these protections, they don’t want the protections of the science or the governance that goes into doing this. So you’re dealing it’s very hard to find leverage with people who don’t have really any beliefs or any agenda. But it’s hard to negotiate with somebody who wants nothing. We had to leave a week early because they couldn’t do a rule to bring up the Bills their own side, their own side couldn’t come and say, you have to be able to come to the side on some bill. You have no idea. And so it’s respect. It’s listening. It’s building off of the information that people have. It’s not anything coming from the top down. It’s all bubble up from the caucus. And there’s one word that I attribute to my caucus, which is courage. They have the courage to go out and make the vote if they believe that this is what we need to do. And if there’s a path that shows that this can become law and that courage, because I know the other side is going to go out and paint the thing like it’s Pooh, Pooh and kaka when we think it’s chocolate ice cream. Bernie Sanders or AOC, they often argue with where the Democrats end up, but they often vote for the bill in the end. I mean, Sanders was there on the Affordable Care Act and every vote people needed. He wasn’t shutting the government down like Ted Cruz. And there are public. Is the thing, in your view, that broke the Republican Party’s ability in the government to act as a coherent institution. The fact that they just don’t believe in or want enough from the government to have reason to continue being partially connected to the negotiation process. Operational I mean, in other words, one of the things I love is being a legislator. It’s hard work. I mean, I don’t say that as a complaint. I love it. I mean, I love it. I love it. But it’s people are working all the time, developing issues, developing policy, whether they start with a bill and/or take it through the process, take it home, listen to constituents at home, see what the possibilities are on the other side of the aisle or the other side of the Capitol. So it’s a triumph. When you pass a bill. It’s a triumph, especially if it’s going to be signed into law. But you have to have goals. You have to have a why. Let’s come back to the why. And you have to have respect for other people’s views. And who’s going to take the lead on something. You some people want to always be in the lead, but they don’t really produce votes. It’s like yeah, that’s interesting. O.K., see you later. But tomorrow, maybe that’ll be another day. But everybody has to know tomorrow is another day. You told a story I really liked in the book about getting your members to vote for the Defense Authorization bill that included the repeal of Don’t Ask, don’t tell. Yeah do you mind telling that here. Well, it was hard because not all the Democrats were, shall we say, were as fully on board as we would have liked them to be. But we did get the number of votes for an Amendment, for an Amendment to the Defense Authorization bill. And don’t ask, don’t tell comes up. I pass the bill. My God. Even the chair of the committee, the Democratic chair of the committee was against it before we passed it. And I said to them, This is pretty exciting today. Now this is Barney Frank. And as you all, everybody you can think of who was lefty, everybody, all the lefties up, you made history today. Yeah, we made history. We repeal in an accident. I said, no, you’re going to make it twice. Why you’re going to vote for the first time for a Defense Authorization bill. Don’t ask us to do that. We will never, ever do it. I said, well, you like the repeal of Don’t Ask, don’t tell. We don’t have it unless we pass a bill. Well, what makes you think everything. What? the Republicans always vote for the defense Bill I said, I can see it in their eyes. I know them. I know them. They ain’t give my ain’t voting for the bill. Are you wet. I might be. I can read lips and I can see it in their eyes. They ain’t voting for it 9 Republicans voted for the bill, 9 Republicans. That means overwhelmingly voted against it. Now, we had some trouble in the Senate, so we had to split it up. And they said, but we got it passed Thanks to Harry Reid. I said, see made history twice in one day. Don’t ever ask me to do that again. We’ll see. We’ll see. I want to recognize Nancy Pelosi. Steny Hoyer. And Harry Reid. Today, we’re marking a historic milestone, but also the culmination of two of the most productive years in the history of Congress, in no small part because of their leadership. And so we are very grateful. I want to go back for a second to you could see it in their eyes. I see it in their eyes. You talk in the book about what makes a good speaker and you say strategic know how. You say a policy background and then you say, above all else, intuition. People don’t usually admit that a big part of their job. There you go. But you’re known as somebody who does know if the votes are going to be there. A lot of people don’t speakers don’t, minority leaders don’t. And you didn’t say to me there, well, we had done a whip count. You don’t have the Republican whip count in your pocket. You’re not a Republican. You also knew that the liberals would do the thing you were telling them ultimately they need to do. You said people say, are you a witch. Where does that intuition come from for what people are going to do. Because it does make you good at that job or it did make you great at that job. It made you important in what’s been happening, the Democratic Party in recent weeks. There’s something deep there. How do you explain why you have it and what separates the people like you who have it in Congress from those who don’t. How do you develop that, women’s or. Well, there are many who do have it. So it’s not just me, but the my whole thing with the members is they’ve no, I’ve never wanted anything. I didn’t want to be appointed to anything. I didn’t want to run for any other office. I loved being in the House. I loved the House. As I say, in the book. You’re close to your constituents as nothing more thrilling to me than walk on the floor and say, I speak for the people of San Francisco, no matter what other honors may be bestowed upon me at the time. But you just walk in see, you’re always observing and learning and respecting and listening to what you think the other side might do and whatever chairs you might get from them. But I knew they weren’t going to vote for this bill. I mean, they’re terrible when it comes to those kinds of issues. I think you’re I think you’re underselling this a little bit. I know that you as speaker, nobody thought you wanted to leave that job. But there’s AI have asked many times over the years about processes you’ve been at the center of and said, well, how did she get them to vote for that. How did she know where they were going to go. How did she just said people will say to you, are you a witch. There’s some intuitive process here. I always think of intuition as the ability to make quick judgments based on a deep of knowledge, right. Something is behind them. Something is behind it. You were known for being very good at staying in touch with your members. Yeah and having a sense of what they needed, where they really were. I thought it was striking in the book very early in the book, when you’re talking about your work as speaker, you write with a lot of pride about all of the leadership positions you created. I think you took it from 8 to 18, something like that. 2/3 of them are created, but early in a book we end up having long chapters about Donald Trump and the Iraq war. Before a lot of that, you’re talking about how important it was that you created these other positions that let other parts of the caucus have a seat near leadership. There’s something you did institutionally, organizationally, that kept you. They kept your finger on the pulse of it. How do you think about that. How do when you know where they all are. Well, I spent a long time in committee work, appropriations and intelligence, even some time on more time than anybody else on ethics. Not that I wanted to do that, but I was paying my dues to the caucus. So I was dedicated committee member. I had no interest in running for leadership. Why would I want to do that when I could be doing appropriations or intelligence or any of that. So you get to know how the system works and who, what lights, who’s fire and the rest. And then, of course, you listen to them. You’re just always listening. That’s how you would learn as you’re always listening. But also, as you said the word before, you have to have a plan. This is the plan because sometimes people say, well, I’m not voting for that because they ain’t going it ain’t going nowhere and you’re making me walk the Plank. And I’m saying, no, we have to. Again, this is a bandwagon. It’s not a convoy that goes as slow as the slowest ship where we’re on the move and we have to show our constituents action. Your real partisan of the House, you quote John Dingell, the late, great member of the House, saying the Republicans are the opposition, but the Senate is the enemy. If there was no Senate or at least if there was no Senate filibuster, if the House was what governed America. If it was the if we were unicameral, one legislative body had America be different today. Well, I don’t advocating for that. I’m not saying I might advocate for a new country starting. I’m having I’m not advocating for that. But I do think the. Compromise that our beautiful visionary founders had in giving every state two votes, 40 million California, two senators, Idaho, two senators. They don’t even have as many constituents as I have in San Francisco. But nonetheless, that was the Constitution. We take an oath to protect and defend it. That was the compromise that created America. They couldn’t foresee 40,000,001 million as the difference between the states, but any of it. So then they decide that it’s going to be 60 votes. So we’re saying 40 percent wins, 41, 40 percent 0.1 a hair wins. This is ridiculous. And this is what we have to fight. And if they don’t, I’m going to keep my promise and send them 100 powdered wigs because they’re just living in a different era. I mean, immigration woman’s right to choose, raise the minimum wage, all these kinds of things. 51 votes like that. And people get frustrated. Why you why can’t you do what you said you were going to do. But we do it in the House. But they don’t do it in the Senate. Well, what’s that. Yeah I mean, a cynicism creeps in, and I think understandably so. I mean, Democrats will run this year on protecting and reinstating through law the protections of Roe. But if they win, they’re not going to have 60 votes in the Senate, which means that even if they do keep the Senate, which means that they can’t really do it because they have to get rid of the filibuster, the rescue package, 51 votes, Ira, 51 votes. You see even the chipset, because it goes through budget reconciliation. Yeah then the chips are now here’s a chip chipset. All the Republicans want the chips. The business community wants the CHIPS Act. You saw the excitement for the CHIPS Act, right. So they were saying to me, we probably some of the Republicans were saying to me, we probably get like 35 Republican votes because they don’t want Biden have any success. So remember, I said anti-science, anti governance, anti whoever the Democratic president is, they have a trifecta going so they don’t have to do anything right and they don’t want to do anything. So saying they were going to give us 35 votes, some of the Democrats thought that we’re giving money to corporate America or something like that. So we couldn’t count on everybody in the ranking member of the science space and Technology Committee that was the committee of jurisdiction makes a beautiful presentation about the bill and the bipartisanship that helped shape the stem parts of it. And the. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 10:00 I’m talking to tech on the phone and I get a thing on my phone and it says, McCarthy just told him nobody can vote for the bill. And whatever his name is, the ranking member has to argue against the bill to manage against the bill tomorrow, which was they should at least let somebody else manage the opposition. When this guy had just made this beautiful speech. And so I said, we just lost all the Republican votes. Where do they go to school. I’m calling their University president. I said it’s o’clock at night. I said to I said, let me just tell my staff, tell the Republicans to go to hell. We’re going to pass the bill without them. O.K. that was my message. I don’t usually use foul language, but that was ridiculous. The CHIPS bill. So I said, just tell him. We don’t need them. We don’t need them. We don’t want them. So I didn’t have the votes at that moment, but I figured I’d one way or another I had to leverage to get them. So we get the votes. When we get to 218, something like 24 Republicans came on board, but not until we passed it ourselves. That’s how bad they are. They wouldn’t even vote for the CHIPS Act, the bill to make us independent, self-reliant as a country for all these products that go into everything that we not that but my phone yours that we do. And then one more this I have to tell you this one more because this one just defies everything. They don’t want Roe v Wade, right. I respect that. I come from an Italian Catholic family. But they think I’m a little too exuberant on the subject. But that’s their problem. I’ve had five children in six years and seven days. I know what I’m talking about here. So the I’m not complaining. It’s beautiful for me, but why should I say that’s what other people should do. So we bring a bill to the floor. Kathy Manning of North Carolina. I’m Congresswoman Kathy Manning. I am proud to represent North Carolina’s sixth congressional district. My bill establishes a federal statutory right for individuals to access and use contraceptives and for health care professionals. To provide them. Congress must immediately pass this bill to ensure people can access their birth control without government interference. We are not willing to play defense on this critically important issue. We are playing offense. Women have a right. To contraception. And then have a right to contraception. Remember said to me, you’re letting them off the hook. They’re going to look good voting for themselves for contraception. Eight Republicans voted for it, 195 voted against it. Some of them women. Women said that our country is that freedom is the public know how dangerous they are. You wrote a book about the art of power. Trump wrote a book years ago, one of the foundations of his public reputation, the art of the deal. Still, he runs saying, look, I’m a good deal maker. All these other politicians, these career politicians didn’t know how to make a good deal. America’s always getting ripped off. These Republicans can’t make a good deal in Congress. You need me. You’ve watched Donald Trump working on deals. You’ve made deals with him. You’ve watched deals fall apart with him. What would you tell the American people about what Trump does and doesn’t know about how to make a deal. Well, if he’s going to make a deal, you have to be true to your word. You have to be honest. And he doesn’t have an honest. Thread in his body. I’ll tell you, you hear them now schmoozing with what’s his name, Musk. When we did our last bill, he’s going out as president. We’re finishing in the lame duck. The bill to keep government open and the rest of it. If you put a dollar in the bill for electric cars, I will veto the bill. $1 we had Mary Barra. We had everybody calling him and saying, what is this. You’re tying the hands of American prosperity. This is an industry. This is a company. Nothing we couldn’t do anything on electric cars because he was so in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. So in the pocket of it, he would shut down government and we couldn’t let that happen. We couldn’t let that get rid of the creep. So I don’t know what kind of a deal that is. That’s not a deal. That’s not. If you do this, I’ll do that. I’m not. I ain’t doing nothing. Some of the other negotiations we had on, he would not face reality like this is one that I it means a lot to me because it’s feeding the children. We wanted to have money for the Children’s programs, school programs during the summer when they were not in school and they still had to eat because that’s where they got their food is when they went to school. But there was no money. There was no money, there was just no money. So he said it was a CR. We came right around. Now it was a CR. A continuing resolution. Yeah has to be absolutely clean. You can’t have anything in it. I’m talking to Steph Curry and all these advocates for feeding the children. So I’m sorry, I can’t do anything has to be clean. So he comes up with, I need $30 billion to pay the farmers. He had ripped off the farmers with his China deal because they couldn’t buy the products and all that stuff the Chinese couldn’t buy. So he was going to give them money to make up for his China stuff. So clean just for people who don’t just continues funding the government at more or less current levels, he says nothing can be in it. And now he wants $30 billion, $30 billion. And he said, this is still clean with that in it. That’s not clean. What are you That’s what I say in the book. Either he’s stupid or he thinks we’re stupid. It ain’t clean, Mr. Now you’re not getting it. Well, then I’m not. You’re not getting it. You understand. You are not getting it. I have to have it. So I need $8 billion for the children’s school program. It can’t do that. That’s not clean. It’s as clean as yours. So we got the $8 billion, but he was trying to pass off $30 billion to cover his stupid whatever you want to call it, on the China thing. So he he’s like he’s the categorical imperative. Whatever he says, that’s what it is. That’s what it is. That’s not a way to make a deal. What’s that. Another bill. They came to me and said, absolutely no, you can’t have any money for global anything. Global health. You can’t have anything. No global. Nothing beyond the regular appropriations. Nothing I’ve told Elton John Bono, Bill Gates, everybody you can think of we ain’t got no money for any vaccines or anything else because the president says no, rah. They said, we forgot. We promised Sudan $700 million to be part of the Abraham Accords. I promised them $700 million. And then they were going to not be at Rogue Nation, which is ridiculous. But nonetheless, this is minutia. I have to have it. I promise. I have to have the money. I have to have $4 billion for the vaccine program. So we got a 700. We got our $4 billion for the vaccine program. So that was O.K. to change the rules for them. But they didn’t know we were not going to do that unless there was something in it for our values. I guess you could hear this and say, well, maybe what Trump does is he comes up with a very harsh starting offer. And then in the end, in these different stories, he got the thing he wanted. He got the money for the farmers, he got the money for Sudan. Is he actually, in a way, a strong dealmaker? Or is your argument here that he could have gotten more of what he wanted if he was willing to treat it. No, he just didn’t want us to get anything. He was not a person of any values. See, when you’re doing the budget, see, I’m an appropriator that’s in my DNA. Really my father was on the Appropriations Committee when he was in. So I love it. And I love every aspect. And when they make presentations in the rooms, I listen to every single word. They’re like, come on, it’s time to go. Everybody else’s leaving. I’m listening. He was like, disgusting. It was holding up money for women, for food, for women, infants and children. They didn’t want to spend that much money because it was going to add to the National debt. If they gave $2 trillion to the richest people in America, they couldn’t feed poor women and infant and children. So no values, no anything. So I don’t think that he was clever in any of it. He didn’t think ahead. He didn’t think ahead or he could have had something better. But to throw his considerable weight around. I saw one the other day. It said him and he sang Kamala is trying to find her color as they’re spraying him with orange. What do you think happens if Donald Trump wins a second term. The race is very close. It’s very close in battleground states. It’s possible you’ve seen him before. You also have a sense of the kinds of Republicans who are now in Congress, which is different. Trump was dealing with a Republican Party that was not fully bought into him in Congress in 2017. It’s a very different Republican Party now. What is possible. What would you predict would be true if him and the Republicans win in 2024? That wasn’t true, then. I can’t envision it. I cannot envision it. The first time, people thought, well, maybe he’ll respect the institution or the presidency. Little did we know he didn’t, but we thought I might. So, O.K., let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. We all want our president to succeed, whoever he may be. But then we saw how vile, how disgusting, how crooked, how everything he was. So now we have to make sure he doesn’t win. And anybody said, well, I didn’t like Hillary because of this or I didn’t like what. Kamala is the person. He’s the other one. That’s the choice. We have to make sure he doesn’t win. I can’t even envision a situation where he would win if he were to win and we didn’t win the House. Imagine how horrible it would be. Imagine how horrible it would be. I can hardly sleep at night as it is, but that would be unspeakable, unthinkable, impossible for our country. We just have to do it all. Own the ground. You own the ground. It’s all over. I’m going to Michigan next week. I might know more after I come back from there. Because until you’re on the ground in each of the United States, you really and I’ve been in Arizona, I’ve been almost every place, but I haven’t been to Michigan. I’ll see what that is. Meantime, Joe Biden, just a remarkable president of the United States. We have to make sure his legend, his legacy, which is our legacy, we pass that. A lot of my members had to take tough votes for it. So we want it to be recognized. But more importantly, we want people to avail themselves of the goodness of it all. And that. Then always our final question what are three books that have influenced you. You’d recommend to me. I don’t know. That influenced me. The Bible, of course. Books I like Norman Lear, used to say, that’s interesting. What’s next. So what book led me to what’s next was one was one of the few Umberto books that I could read with great ease called the Island of the day before the island of David was about the age of wonder, which I love the age of wonder. When all these countries were competing in the world, you could measure, measure latitude by the stars, but longitude, you had to have something else. So it’s about that. And then that took me down the path of studying longitude and where the first clock came that could be on a boat and all that so that open doors, what’s next. Another one is I read over and over again some multi time, some just once of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books. The one I like the best is love in the time of cholera, and so all about the culture and the almost witchcraft of the region. But I read all this as books. There’s one I’m all of a sudden blanking on the author age of wonder. Have you ever read that. God, it’s the best book it talks about. And I used to give it to everybody. I’ll send it to you. It talks about in that era when Darwin went South, he really couldn’t come home and publish for a long time. But quasi religious. The religious community couldn’t accept that. So it was a couple of decades, or at least before he could. So it’s about that. But it talked about the first use of the word scientist, which was not used until like the 1820s or something like that, because religion and science, it had to find its path, not necessarily together for a while. So those are three. I love what influenced me. I don’t know. I have an insatiable appetite for any books about our country and our founders and Lincoln everything. I’ll just close by telling you this. I’m from Baltimore. Originally national anthem was written there. So when you go to the game and you come to the end land of the free, home of the brave and everybody Cheers. I cheer. Before that. I cheer when it says bombs bursting and all that proof through the night that our flag was still there and our flag was still at. That’s where we are now. We’re in the night and we have to prove through this night that our flag is still there. Nancy Pelosi, Thank you so much. Wonderful to see you. Thank you.

She has a new book, “ The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House ,” and she came by The Times to talk about what she has learned, why she does what she does, and how she sees this moment in American politics.

This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

We’re talking on the day that Vice President Kamala Harris named Tim Walz as her vice-presidential pick in the campaign. He is the first former House member to be on a Democratic ticket since Al Gore. What was he like in the House?

He was remarkable in the House. He came winning a Republican seat. So he was a red to blue candidate. He came as the longest-serving noncommissioned officer in the military ever to serve in the Congress. So he was on a path of veterans affairs and the rest. He came having worked in farming as a child and so rural America was a big priority for him.

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Synonyms for More importantly

346 other terms for more importantly - words and phrases with similar meaning.