136 Quotes by Adam Gopnik

The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another. –109

We surf the waves of capitalism, from crest to trough and back again, but the funny thing is that no matter how often we ride the wave, nobody notices that it's wet. When we are on the crest, we believe that we have climbed a mountain through our own virtuous efforts, and when we are in the trough, we believe that we have fallen into a pit through out own vice.

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World

What [Adam] Smith took from [David] Hume’s demonstration of the limits of reason, the absurdity of superstition, and the primacy of the passions was not a lesson of Buddhist-Stoical indifference but something more like a sense of Epicurean intensity—if we are living in the material world, then let us make it our material.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a "scientific" hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. "Reason" became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing.

Quote by Robert, a garçon who accepted a 'fat envelope' to leave the Balzar: Anyway it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves—though only after the crisis is over. Still, that's enough lucidity for anyone. Anyway, it is all the lucidity that life will give you. The crucial thing is that is was _our choice._ We made it. We _chose_ to leave. /293