51 Quotes by Philip Gourevitch

Cycling is an excruciating sport - a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain - and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose.

...great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute. The ideology of genocide is all of those things.

What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.

Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as one cohesive national society.

I can't imagine trying to second guess what George Plimpton would do, ... The magazine has this tremendous tailwind moving it along, but there also has to be room to reconnect to a new time. These new articles will have a distinctive flavor and will address themselves to the world at large.

He's a villain who doesn't need to be vilified. He does it himself, ... He wanted to be a very good bad guy.

Look around. It's harder and harder to find good fiction in mainstream magazines. I want this magazine to appeal to people interested in longform writing. This is anti-blog. It's writing worth the investment of time.

The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killings since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Administration officials took to telling reporters that Washington was contributing to a public-health initiative in Uganda to clean up more than ten thousand Rwandan corpses from the shores of Lake Victoria.