64 Quotes by David Remnick

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.

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.

Just before his exile, Solzhenitsyn wrote his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders.” “Your dearest wish,” he informed them, “is for our state structure and our ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds a way to develop or else it collapses.” And with that, Solzhenitsyn was gone.

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

I’m not sure it is possible to describe just how hard it is to acquire a reputation as a drunk in Russia.

I think it is a more courageous stance to abandon honestly something which has been devalued by history instead of carrying it to the end in your soul.

But the symbolism of the miners’ strike was extraordinary. The miners embodied the vanguard of the proletariat, a bastion of Bolshevism in the old days. To look out at the great crown of them in Lenin Square was to see a kind of poster for what had once been called “the masses.” And now the masses were walking off the job and declaring that socialism had not delivered anything – not even a bar of soap.

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

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