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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump lies with astonishing frequency and in stunning volume.

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.

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.

There are inconsistencies in Donald Trump's ideology.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.

The only reason to be in business is to be great.

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

I don't know that Donald Trump is anything more to Putin than what Lenin called a poleznye durak, a useful idiot.

You are losing because of Jewish bankers.

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.

We have to do our jobs better, more tirelessly and stop whining about it.

I don't think there will be fascism in America, but we have to do everything we can to fight against it.

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.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.