The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
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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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.
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Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners
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That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
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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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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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Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
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In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
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There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend
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It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it
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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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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
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I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
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The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.
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What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are – the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.
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We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]
ADAM GOPNIK