Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by David Remnick - Page 2

Donald Trump lies with astonishing frequency and in stunning volume.

Donald Trump appoints people of low quality, to say the least.

The only reason the word "brand" gets a little tiresome is that something that is complex and wonderful and deep begins to sound like a can of tomato soup. I recoil at that, but I'm used to it. I know what it means: It means that The New Yorker is not merely the magazine that comes out in print once a week. It's the Web site, it's the festival, it's our mobile application - all these things - and what they stand for and what they mean.

Mobile is great for us. I think, even though the size of the screen doesn't give everything The New Yorker has to offer, people are spending a lot of time reading - and reading seriously - on the phone.

Donald Trump is going to have to live in the real world in which Vladimir Putin is exactly who he presents himself to be, and Putin is extremely skilled. He's not going to make it very easy for the United States or Germany. And he's going to test Trump.

Trump's election is part of an international trend that's no less alarming, in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Austria. Vladimir Putin wanted to see this outcome no less than he would like to see nationalists and anti-Europeanists win in France.

I know from my conversations with people in the administration that every world leader that Obama met in Berlin, in Peru, in Athens was extremely alarmed by Trump's election. That very much includes Angela Merkel.

Donald Trump seems to think it is within his rights to trample the First Amendment, to disdain the press, to punish protesters or flag-burners, to ban ethnic categories of immigrants, and so on.

The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.

Vladimir Putin wants to become the de facto head of an illiberal, xenophobic, hypernationalist trend in world politics.

There's nothing wrong with creating jobs. What's wrong is to seed the illusion that you will magically bring back the economy of 1970, that you will reopen coal mines.

I think the Electoral College is an absurd 18th-century construct. But that is the law.

Maybe Santa Claus is real. Here's the problem: reality.

There are systemic, painful problems of globalization and de-industrialization that cannot be solved with a phone call or a tweet or an angry speech or trying to isolate the press and the first amendment. Sooner or later, the Donald Trump show, which is a projection of strength and authority, will have to deliver to his voters. And if he doesn't, in very real terms, if he can't supersede a situation where a president cut the unemployment rate in half, if he can't do better, if he can't open factories and all the rest that he's promised, then I think he's in trouble.

We run all kinds of ads, as long as they are clearly marked as advertising when there's ever a question. I think advertising is advertising. If it's 100 percent clear what it is, then, with certain exceptions, I can live with that.

There are inconsistencies in Donald Trump's ideology.

What I object to is tricking the reader and blurring the lines so that unsuspecting readers, thinking that they are getting something that is assigned and edited by the editorial side, are getting something quite different. They are getting an advertisement.

I would like to see Russia not invade Ukraine or put pressure on and threaten Baltic states. But we live in the real and existing world.

We can hope that the responsibilities and realities will weigh on Donald Trump and he will not be the president we fear, but rather something more stable.

I would love to have a stable, productive relationship with Russia.

I know, too, that millions and millions of people voted for Trump not because they are cartoon racists, but because they did not like Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons, because they had real economic and social grievances.

Trump's rise is troubling not just on an American level but on an international level.

Vladimir Putin wants practical things, like the end of economic sanctions, but he also wants far greater sway in Europe and in the overall ideological trends of the world.

There are days when you might enjoy being an editor a little less, due to one crisis or another. It is absolutely vital, to me, in a period of technological evolution and sometimes financial stress that I and my colleagues not only put out a fantastic magazine and Web site and all the rest, but also that we are smart enough about what we are doing.

My deep sense of alarm has to do with Donald Trump's seeming lack of fealty to constitutionalism.

Disaster can take a nation by surprise, slowly, and then all at once.

Ronald Reagan came to office and had already been an experienced politician as governor of California, whose ideology and ideas, no matter how simplistic or no matter how much you may disagree with them, were fairly well-developed and fairly consistent. Donald Trump is a real-estate branding operator and a reality-show television star whose entrance into big-time politics, as a victor, as someone who will now wield tremendous power, was as shocking to him as it was to everybody else.

We begin to inhabit oppositional and rarely intersecting mental universes having to do with ideology and fact and non-fact and news and non-news.

As journalists, we need to find every avenue to distribute our work, and try to be so good that we become increasingly more influential than before.

I've never encountered someone in public life who has less desire to hold office than Michelle Obama, though she is incredibly gifted at retail politics.

Being nervous, first of all, puts you at a distinct disadvantage, and if you've really prepared and if you've really thought through how to start the conversation, things start to fall into place. There are other things I get nervous about, but not that.

You are losing out because Mexican rapists are taking your job.

There are two forms of populism, left-wing populism and right-wing populism. Right-wing populism requires the denigration of an "Other." Left-wing populism tends to be about the haves and have-nots.

The internet is very democratizing in some ways, but it also has other effects.

From a personal point of view, I'd like to interview my great-grandparents because I barely knew them, and I know next to nothing about my family beyond 100 years.

I don't want to romanticize the world in which everybody watched three networks and the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were incredibly dominant. That time has passed.