Quotes from David Remnick

For decades, the massacres at Kalinin, Starobelsk, and Katyn had been a symbol for the Poles of Moscow's cruelty and imperial grip. For a Pole merely to hint that the Soviet Union was responsible for the massacres was a radical, even suicidal act, for it made clear the speaker's point of view: the "friendship of peoples," the relationship between Moscow and Warsaw, was one based on violence, an occupier's reign over its satellite.

For a teenage girl, finding the balance between childhood fearlessness and adult vulnerability can be tougher than landing a triple axel.

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.

He said that it was Ronald Reagan's strategy of negotiation through strength that brought the Kremlin to its knees.

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.

WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny," Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. "The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise." Yes

According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin's victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater—perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now.

She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love.

Without recognizing it, we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change. I believe that we are at the end of nature.

In the introduction, Amy Butler the senior minister at Riverside and a friend of Clinton's, referred to the Trump Administration as a source of anguish and confusion, and everyone nodded solemly'.

Most of the people I knew were doing one thing but considered themselves to be something else: all the waitresses I knew were really actresses, all the Xeroxers in the Xerox place were really novelists, all the receptionists were artists.

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.

forecasts have to be based on the past, and

Legions of eight-year-old girls were pursuing both skaters everywhere. Too young to have learned "Thrilled to meet you!" or other adult forms of flattery, the little girls just studied Tara and Michelle with hard dolls' eyes while waiting for their heroines to sign their autograph books.

When Communist Party chiefs in Russia went fishing, scuba divers plunged underwater and put fish on the hooks. When they went hunting, specially bred elk, stag, and deer were made to saunter across the field in point-blank range. Everyone had a wonderful time. When the king of Afghanistan visited the Tajik resort of Tiger Gorge, he blew away the last Turan tiger in the country.

Still, there was a heaviness to her manner, a kind of grim determination to get a message across, one last time.

a cocktail of three parts gin to one part lime juice, honey, vermouth, and apricot brandy in equal portions—a cocktail so delicious

I think dealing with the U.S. Senate is very different from dealing with the electorate.

To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.

Not all political prisoners are innocents.

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.

I've never encountered someone in public life who has less desire to hold office than Michelle Obama, though she is incredibly gifted at retail politics.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.