Time & Perspective Quote by Barbara Walters

There is something bracingly candid about a woman famous for asking other people hard questions admitting she can be undone by an airplane aisle. Walters frames her prayer almost like a guilty tic: not religion, not conviction, just a reflex she can’t quite justify. The parenthetical hedge - "whether it's superstition or whatever" - is doing heavy lifting. It’s a preemptive defense against the kind of judgment she spent a career navigating: the expectation that a public, modern, rational woman should have outgrown rituals that smell like faith.

The line works because it treats prayer less as theology than as technology: a small script for managing risk. Flying is one of those modern experiences that exposes how thin our sense of control really is. Walters, a journalist who built authority through poise and preparation, admits that in certain conditions the professional armor doesn’t matter. The repetition - "I just automatically do it... the same thing every time" - is the tell. This is not a search for meaning; it’s a coping mechanism, like buckling a seatbelt twice.

Context matters, too. Walters came of age in a midcentury culture where religious identity was both socially prominent and politely compartmentalized, especially for public figures. By mentioning "church or synagogue" she signals breadth and distance at once: she knows the institutions, but she’s not claiming membership. The subtext is intimate and oddly democratic: even the most composed interviewer has private superstitions, and modernity hasn’t replaced them so much as given them new places to surface - 35,000 feet up, when you can’t negotiate your way out.