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
Big writers become a kind of shared climate. - Adam Gopnik
[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. - Adam Gopnik
Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality. - Adam Gopnik
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing. - Adam Gopnik
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist. - Adam Gopnik
It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks. - Adam Gopnik
Wit and puns aren't just decor 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
What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity. - Adam Gopnik