David Remnick Quotes

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

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

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

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

The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.

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

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

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.

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.

The only reason the word "brand" gets a little tiresome is that something that is complex and wonderful and deep begins to sound like a can of tomato soup. I recoil at that, but I'm used to it. I know what it means: It means that The New Yorker is not merely the magazine that comes out in print once a week. It's the Web site, it's the festival, it's our mobile application - all these things - and what they stand for and what they mean.

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

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

I know, too, that millions and millions of people voted for Trump not because they are cartoon racists, but because they did not like Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons, because they had real economic and social grievances.

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.

Instagram - it's fun, but Facebook, no, just here and there. I use Instagram as a kick, like when somebody tells me to check out so-and-so's Instagram account to check out their French toast or a trip to Tanzania. But I don't have an account.

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.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Donald Trump lies with astonishing frequency and in stunning volume.

Democratic institutions, even in the oldest operating democracy in the world, are anything but perfect.

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 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.

I actually have great hopes for the future.

Prediction is a low form of journalism.

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.

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

I am an adult; deliberately naïve, dewy-eyed optimism is not the proper posture for a responsible adult, is it?

Donald Trump is going to have to live in the real world in which Vladimir Putin is exactly who he presents himself to be, and Putin is extremely skilled. He's not going to make it very easy for the United States or Germany. And he's going to test Trump.

Trump's rise is troubling not just on an American level but on an international level.

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.

There are systemic, painful problems of globalization and de-industrialization that cannot be solved with a phone call or a tweet or an angry speech or trying to isolate the press and the first amendment. Sooner or later, the Donald Trump show, which is a projection of strength and authority, will have to deliver to his voters. And if he doesn't, in very real terms, if he can't supersede a situation where a president cut the unemployment rate in half, if he can't do better, if he can't open factories and all the rest that he's promised, then I think he's in trouble.

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