David Remnick Quotes

I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.

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.

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.

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.

100% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.100

The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.

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.

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.

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.

We should put pressure on power and write the truth and write relentlessly and fearlessly. That's the job.

I would also like to see Russia not interfere in our elections.

You have to understand that a lot of the working class is not white.

I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.

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.

I think we should be alarmed, watchful, and, as journalists, rigorous and fearless. I think we should be alert.

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.

Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Donald Trump's temperament and character is precisely what you would hate to see in your children, much less your president.

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.

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.

The Democratic vote consists of minorities and educated whites.

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.

A huge constituency, such as Hispanics, is not 100 percent Democratic.

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.

You are losing because blacks are getting their civil rights in the cities.

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

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

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.

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

Donald Trump lies with astonishing frequency and in stunning volume.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.