43 Quotes by Daniel Okrent

When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging,” either Capone or one of his amanuenses said. “When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.” It was a recurrent theme, this shrugging disavowal of evil intent: “Ninety percent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble,” he said at another time, “and my offense has been to furnish them with those amusements.

Now I worry. If people ended up liking me, did I do the job wrong? So I decided they didn’t end up liking me – they ended up being able to deal with me.

If you really hate George Bush, you don’t want to read about his hobbies or that he’s nice to his friends or that he’s good company at dinner.

If you can’t enjoy the game unless you are pretty sure your team is going to win, baseball is not the game for you. Remember, the best team in baseball in any year is going to be beaten about 60 times.

Closing one’s ears to the complaints of partisans would also entail closing one’s mind to the substance of their arguments.

I’m saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism.

But I think it’s undeniable that the Times is a liberal paper.

It’s a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

The iron miners who belonged to the Italian Club in the town of Virginia, Minnesota, took pains to procure more suitable grapes, dispatching a grocer named Cesare Mondavi to the San Joaquin Valley late each summer to acquire their supply. Inspired to get into the grape business himself, Mondavi soon moved his family to California, where his precocious son Robert would make his own name in the winemaking world.