Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow?
ADAM GOPNIKIf we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
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The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
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Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.
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If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios
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Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.
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Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency
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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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The basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
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I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
ADAM GOPNIK