If 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. '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

Categorized in : World People Causes

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

Adam Gopnik

scandal moral brutality

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Adam Gopnik

swim travel firsts

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.

Adam Gopnik

powerful giving mean

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

Adam Gopnik

speak writing thinking

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

Adam Gopnik

crazy men thinking

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, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

Adam Gopnik

distance simple believe

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

Adam Gopnik

light paper knows

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.

Adam Gopnik

eye heart writing

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

Adam Gopnik

two firsts thinking

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Adam Gopnik

being-free loneliness feelings

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Adam Gopnik

good-times sometimes thinking

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

Adam Gopnik

regret missing joy

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Adam Gopnik

scarcity innovation ease

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

Adam Gopnik

mazes magic mind

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

Adam Gopnik

mind beautiful men

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. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries.

Adam Gopnik

charlie-hebdo musical book

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

Adam Gopnik

wine mean thinking

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Adam Gopnik

bugs essentials mind

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

Adam Gopnik

people ideas thinking

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

Adam Gopnik

practice writing thinking