Quotes from David Remnick

I'm a civilian, a citizen.

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.

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.

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.

Nor could they compete very well with the immensity of the Stalin cult in all its forms: the parades celebrating Stalin as a god on earth, the newspapers describing his heroic deeds, the radio addresses, the history books written by the Kremlin ideologists, the rallies and paramilitary drills of the Young Pioneers.

Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight," Havel wrote, "which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air. The final effect in each case is silence: the silence of the half-mad man who is constantly writing appeals to world authorities while everyone ignores him; and the silence of the Orwellian citizen.

I surmised that this project would prove a mistake, like Mr. Churchill's attempt to take Gallipoli in 1915, but it would be the kind of mistake that would look good in his memoirs.

he wished that he had been more faithful as a child in heeding the advice of his boxing teacher. After all, the old masters did know something. There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop.

Superb athletes fascinate in part because they seem like proxies for ourselves in a metaphorical battle with the eternal: broken records are death-negating acts.

in Moscow, being paranoid doesn't mean doom is not on the way.

Many people could not understand that the idea of government is not to provide, the way parents provide for a child.

It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.

intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

drove off. King and Goffin went home to Jersey. That night, after tucking their kids into bed, they sat down and wrote the music and the lyrics. By the next morning, they had a hit.

the same day Stephen Schneider assured the subcommittee that "there is virtually no scientific controversy" over the contention that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will produce higher temperatures. "That's not a speculative theory," he said.

Most of the major events of human history gradually lose their meaning: wars that seemed at the time all

Suffering is to cyclists what poll data are to politicians; they rely on it to tell them how well they are doing their job.

Francis Bretherton, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Time that if the Great Plains became a dust bowl and people followed the seasonable temperatures north, Canada might replace the United States as the Western superpower.

wildly speculative.

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

In the lobby, an old woman with legs wrapped in elastic bandages mopped the floor with filthy water. She kept missing the same spot, over and over. There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant, bad tobacco, and wet wool. This was the smell of Russia indoors, the smell of the woman in front of you on line, the smell of every elevator. Near an abandoned newsstand, dozens of overcoats hung on long rows of pegs, somber and dark, lightly steaming, like nags in a stable.

Me, I always stayed away from him. Where I come from they have a saying: 'The farther away you keep from the czar, the longer you stay alive.' 

Perhaps one day Russia might even become somehow ordinary, a country of problems rather than catastrophes, a place that develops rather than explodes. That would be something to see.