Top 30 Quotes & Sayings by Ezra Klein

It's not a good idea to conceptualize a static relationship with long-standing policies, like health care.

I think it's weird that the news cedes so much ground to Wikipedia. That isn't true in other informational sectors.

If I'm sitting around exulting over traffic data, I'm an idiot.

My only advice is to try to get the job that's most like the job you want, rather than the one that's more prestigious. Always try to be the talent.

When you're trying to come up with a good approach to reporting on the bleeding edge of where the conversation's moving, you're just leaving a lot of people who aren't on the bleeding edge of that conversation out.

Every newspaper in the country covers stories that other newspapers cover. Every industry is filled with people who are competing to do the best job providing a particular service.

People set newspapers on fire; they use them for wrapping fish. The Internet does not have that property. What I don't think we've gotten is that you can make things last longer than in print.

The idea of changing and fixing the problem of how news is presented on the Internet has been recognized for a long time.

When I talk to people about 'KnowMore', it is as an experiment. The biggest thing I'll say there is that we've learned a lot from 'KnowMore'.

When I first came to Washington, what I admired most was that people were just really, really smart with a tremendous amount of intellectual horsepower and the ability to look at an issue and say something fresh.

My career wouldn't exist without blogs, electronic text, hyperlinks, and mass online audiences.

The thing to remember about being young is you eventually get old.

One of my big beliefs about Washington is that we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly underrate seeing Washington as a system, in general, but, in particular, we highly underrate the power of Congress.

Everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.

We're actually just moving one type of deficit to another. But, the problem with this second type of deficit is that you drive on it and then it falls down.

If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that's unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't 'too soon.' It's much too late.

I don't trust this [american] government to be regulating corporations. I trust big business to be regulated [by itself] and to be a party to a decent solution.

A government shutdown, it isn't the end of the world. It`s a bad thing. The government stops working for a few days. We cover it a lot. Polls turn against who ever made it stop working.

I do think that there is a very unclear level of conduct in the Trump administration. That's one reason you're seeing this among so many different secretaries. Again, Trump himself has been bending ethics rules left and right.

The American political system is not good at trading sacrifice now to prevent crises later.

If it's cynical, risky politics that brings a lighted match and a can of gas near the Democratic coalition, it should be named as such, and its consequences understood, and it should become part of the complex calculus we're all building to help us understand these campaigns.

Obamas finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They dont even really inspire. They elevate. . . . He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh . . . Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves.

This is a very proud moment for journalism. I think The New York Times and The Washington Post are genuine champions in this moment. The role that they are playing in democracy is the role that you hear about journalism playing in civics classes. Other people are doing great work, but the Times and the Post have really been leaders. The public is watching, and they are hungry. They know something is wrong, there's a lot of anxiety out there. There's a real sense that the mission of journalism is very clear.

Maintaining news cycle is the job. It's always been the job. This is just more intense. You find out what the story is, you use the tools you have to get clear on it, you bring the knowledge that you've built up over the past however long. Part of the trick is just having people who know what they're doing. In terms of the pace, yeah, it's exhausting. I feel for all of us in the media, and in the White House and in the country. I mean, this is not a fun time.

You are never going to have, in a country as rich as ours [the USA], that borders a country as poor as Mexico, an end to immigration. You just won't. The question is, if you make it humane and if you make it regulated. It's much better for an American worker to compete against a regulated immigrant inside labor standards, than it is to ever to compete against an illegal immigrant.

We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism.

I don't always have the time I wish I had to understand something I don't understand. So I'm trying to do a little bit less of the quick pieces and a little bit more of the "here's how the Singaporean health care system works" kind of stuff, because to be good at my job, I have to keep learning. The thing that I fear the most is becoming one of those journalists who is still trying to apply the thinking of the decade in which they started three or four decades later.

The news is challenging right now. One hard thing about it is that often things don't lend themselves to good explanations or we don't have enough information. So we are sometimes in pretty murky waters, as everyone is. But it's an era where people's anxiety about what's going on and need to understand what's happening around them has created a real demand for news coverage that's dedicated to filling that need.

Even more fundamental than housing to the global financial economy is the idea that the U.S. government is a safe asset.