David Remnick Quotes

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

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

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

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

I use social media every day. I don't have a Twitter account, but not because I'm a dinosaur about it. I have enough of a platform here. People in my position who do it tend to use it in a promotional way or in a hamstrung way. I look at Twitter all the time as a news tool or for cultural conversation. I've used it in my reporting. It's very useful.

I'm not the slowest writer that you know.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There are inconsistencies in Donald Trump's ideology.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.

You are losing because of Jewish bankers.

The Democratic vote consists of minorities and educated whites.

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

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.

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.

On Facebook, a lie can seem as convincing to some as an article from SPIEGEL or the Washington Post. That's a problem. I can then like it and like it again and start creating my own media universe, both for me and for my friends, and so we become more and more fenced off from one another.

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.

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.

I have to always remember, writing is really hard.

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

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.

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.

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

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?