David Remnick famous quotes

05-12-2025

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

#Pressure #Journalism #Kind
The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.
-- David Remnick

#Party #Mafia #World
I'm not the slowest writer that you know.
-- 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

#Years #Culture #Four
Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism,
-- David Remnick

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

#Lying #People #Cartoon
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

#Beautiful #Jobs #Crazy
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

#Russia #Class #Mafia
I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.
-- David Remnick

#Thinking #Different #Electorate
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

#Writing #Practice #Wish
Not all political prisoners are innocents.
-- David Remnick

#Political #Prisoner
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

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

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

#Mistake #Thinking #Vanity
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

#Graduation #Mean #Eye
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

#Long #Waiting #President
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

#One Day #Population #May
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

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

#Running #Independent #Risk
I actually have great hopes for the future.
-- David Remnick

#Hope For The Future
Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.
-- David Remnick

#Russia #Als #Capone
I have to always remember, writing is really hard.
-- David Remnick

#Writing #Remember
I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.
-- David Remnick

#Years #Differences #Journalism
Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.
-- David Remnick

#Cold #Unforgiving

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