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 GOPNIKThat, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers
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I think I’m more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.
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Making an idea into an emotion.
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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.
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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We’ve had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants.
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Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
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The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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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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The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors
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Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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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 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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If you’re being attacked from all sides, it’s possible you’re doing something right; it’s also possible that you are doing everything wrong.
ADAM GOPNIK