The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
ADAM GOPNIKIt mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
-
-
The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes
ADAM GOPNIK -
You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
ADAM GOPNIK -
I try to turn a written thing, when I’m in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.
ADAM GOPNIK -
In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.
ADAM GOPNIK -
The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
ADAM GOPNIK -
A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.
ADAM GOPNIK -
A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
ADAM GOPNIK -
Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:
ADAM GOPNIK -
We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.
ADAM GOPNIK -
Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
ADAM GOPNIK -
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
ADAM GOPNIK