Remnick David Quotes & Sayings

98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

I actually have great hopes for the future. — David Remnick

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

The battle over society - its direction, its temper, its organization, its character - is often played out on the square. But the battle rarely ends; it does not easily resolve [David Remnick, "Geopolitics: Strength in Numbers"]. — Catie Marron

I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one. — David Remnick

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

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. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party. — David Remnick

I'm not the slowest writer that you know. — David Remnick

I'm not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

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

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long. — David Remnick

She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love. — David Remnick

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

Very rarely is there a spike in news-stand sales. — David Remnick

Memorial, Elena said, wanted to "give a name" to the victims of the Stalin era; — David Remnick

Not all political prisoners are innocents. — David Remnick

I'm a civilian, a citizen. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

I have to always remember, writing is really hard. — David Remnick

Reform is not a period of retreat. — David Remnick

WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny," Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. "The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise." Yes, — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

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

Freedom! To fill people's mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information on people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right of peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passersby with advertisements. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving. — David Remnick

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

According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin's victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater - perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now. — David Remnick

In the lobby, an old woman with legs wrapped in elastic bandages mopped the floor with filthy water. She kept missing the same spot, over and over. There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant, bad tobacco, and wet wool. This was the smell of Russia indoors, the smell of the woman in front of you on line, the smell of every elevator. Near an abandoned newsstand, dozens of overcoats hung on long rows of pegs, somber and dark, lightly steaming, like nags in a stable. — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

Clearly independent journalists - domestic journalists - run a high risk if they dare to take on serious investigative work. — David Remnick

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? — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism, — David Remnick

One cannot exclude the possibility of a fascist period in Russia," Staravoitova said on the radio station Echo of Moscow. "We can see too many parallels between Russia's current situation and that of Germany after the Versailles Treaty. A great nation is humiliated, and many of its nationals live outside the country's borders. The disintegration of an empire has taken place at a time when many people still have an imperialist mentality. ... All this is happening at a time of economic crisis. — David Remnick

Outside the basement door was a covered pen that housed a rooster and a seagull. The rooster had been on his way to Colonel Sanders' when he fell off a truck and broke a drumstick. Someone called Carol, as people often do, and she took the rooster into her care. He was hard of moving, but she had hopes for him. He was so new there he did not even have a name. The seagull, on the other hand, had been with her for years. He had one wing. She had picked him up on a beach three hundred miles away. His name was Garbage Belly. --John McPhee, Travels in Georgia (1973) — David Remnick

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. — David Remnick

Stewart, with the help of his incredibly astute staff, was combining reporting with commentary, pointing a finger at stupidity and hollowness, and devising a creative hand grenade. All of it had political purpose and direction. It wasn't strictly ideological, although he's obviously left of center. And he was fearless, not in the sense that anybody was going to make him a political prisoner. But he punched up. He punched up, and the shots landed.

I don't think the world is any more absurd now than it's ever been, or more tragic, or more beautiful. But Jon took advantage of these new ways of seeing the world and took out his magic marker and drew circles around the idiocy. He set out to be a working comedian, and he ended up an invaluable patriot. He wants his country to be better, more decent, and to think harder.

~ DAVID REMNICK, editor in chief, the New Yorker — Chris Smith

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