Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by David Remnick
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist David Remnick.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Reform is not a period of retreat.
Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.
The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.
98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.
I have to always remember, writing is really hard.
I'm a civilian, a citizen.
I'm not the slowest writer that you know.
Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.
There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.
A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.
I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.
I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.
You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
Russian is such a tough and complex language that I am happy enough to understand everything and read most things pretty well, but, without constant practice, my speech is not what I wish it was, and I would sooner write in crayon than write a letter in Russian.
I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.
Not all political prisoners are innocents.
I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.
The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.
To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.
My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.
I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.
Very rarely is there a spike in news-stand sales.
If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.
Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.
Clearly independent journalists - domestic journalists - run a high risk if they dare to take on serious investigative work.
Most magazines have peak moments. They live on, they do just okay, or they die. 'The New Yorker' has had a very different kind of existence.
I actually have great hopes for the future.
Prediction is a low form of journalism.
I don't think there will be fascism in America, but we have to do everything we can to fight against it.
On Facebook, a lie can seem as convincing to some as an article from SPIEGEL or the Washington Post. That's a problem. I can then like it and like it again and start creating my own media universe, both for me and for my friends, and so we become more and more fenced off from one another.
The Democratic vote consists of minorities and educated whites.
If this day means anything, it means that you are now in the contingent of the responsible. You must be kind, yes, but you must also look beyond your own house. We're depending on you for your efforts and your vision. We are depending on your eye and your imagination to identify what wrongs exist and persist, and on your hands, your backs, your efforts, to right them.
We should put pressure on power and write the truth and write relentlessly and fearlessly. That's the job.
I live in a country where, at least by my sense of arithmetic and justice, Al Gore should have been president, not George W. Bush. To this day, John Kerry probably thinks he won Ohio in 2004 because he had suspicions about the vote in Ohio. And, by the way, Richard Nixon had suspicions in 1960 about the vote in Chicago when he lost to JFK.
100% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.100
You are losing because blacks are getting their civil rights in the cities.
The question for so many is the quality of work, the future of work under globalism and de-industrialization. A typical example is a person who had a good factory job making 80,000 dollars, with health insurance, who was able to send his kids possibly to college and then he or she suddenly loses that job because the factory closed down. And now that same person is bagging groceries at Walmart and making $35,000.
You are losing because of Jewish bankers.
What about our refusal to look squarely at the degradation of the planet we inhabit? In the last election cycle many candidates refused even to acknowledge the hard science, irrefutable science, of climate change. The president, while readily accepting the facts, has done far too little to alter them. How long are we, are you, prepared to wait?
The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.
Instagram - it's fun, but Facebook, no, just here and there. I use Instagram as a kick, like when somebody tells me to check out so-and-so's Instagram account to check out their French toast or a trip to Tanzania. But I don't have an account.
Being an editor it's a complicated job, but the last impression I'd want anybody to have is that it's onerous. It's a joy - a complicated joy, but a joy.
The only reason to be in business is to be great.
Democratic institutions, even in the oldest operating democracy in the world, are anything but perfect.
I think we should be alarmed, watchful, and, as journalists, rigorous and fearless. I think we should be alert.
I would also like to see Russia not interfere in our elections.
The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.
I am an adult; deliberately naïve, dewy-eyed optimism is not the proper posture for a responsible adult, is it?
A huge constituency, such as Hispanics, is not 100 percent Democratic.
You have to understand that a lot of the working class is not white.
Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology-and, what's more, the population will hardly protest the extinction.
I got in journalism for any number of reasons, not least because it's so much fun. Journalism should be in the business of putting pressure on power, finding out the truth, of shining a light on injustice, of, when appropriate, being amusing and entertaining - it's a complicated and varied beast, journalism.
Donald Trump's temperament and character is precisely what you would hate to see in your children, much less your president.
The minority vote is growing, which is part of the alarm of so many Republicans and why Trump constantly whipped up their alarm with his racist statements.
I use social media every day. I don't have a Twitter account, but not because I'm a dinosaur about it. I have enough of a platform here. People in my position who do it tend to use it in a promotional way or in a hamstrung way. I look at Twitter all the time as a news tool or for cultural conversation. I've used it in my reporting. It's very useful.
The one thing I'm quite critical of Hillary Clinton for, and it obviously hurt her, is that at some level, the Clintons had to know that she was going to run for president. Why did they feel it necessary to make tens of millions of dollars with speaking engagements? They must have known that it would look grotesque. The word for it is "buckraking." It's beyond me. I don't understand it.
Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism.
Journalism, some huge percentage of it, should be devoted to putting pressure on power, on nonsense, on chicanery of all kinds and if that's going to invite a lawsuit, well, bring it on.
I don't know that Donald Trump is anything more to Putin than what Lenin called a poleznye durak, a useful idiot.
We have to do our jobs better, more tirelessly and stop whining about it.
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