I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them.
ADAM GOPNIKWe’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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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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What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?
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I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
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The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.
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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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Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.
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Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.
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The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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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.
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I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.
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I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.
ADAM GOPNIK






