Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Jen Psaki appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Wednesday, April 30, 2025. | Paramount Plus

Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

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• “Harvard just scrapped its office of Diversity Inclusion and Belonging and has renamed it the office of campus and community life. They will move focus from underrepresented minorities to first generation and low income students instead. Resegregation comes to Harvard.” — Alejandro Caraballo, American civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic

• “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.” — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker

• “If you take [diversity] away and try to distill us just down to white folks, we’ll be like Europe, an aging, slowly dying former empire. The Roman Empire didn’t survive because it didn’t have enough strength in its diversity. It suppressed its diversity, and it died. If the U.S. wants to be the Roman Empire, keep voting the way you voting, y’all.” — Joy Reid

• “Once again, socialism is like a nude beach: sounds pretty nice until you see it in person.” — David Burge

• “I’m black, I’m terrified. I’m scared for my trans friends and people who we know and love, our neighbors are disappeared. And that was the goal and [Trump] did it. He did it. He did exactly what he wanted to do because I — you know feel less welcome in my home than I did, you know, last year, and that’s the goal. That was the goal.” — Comedian Amber Ruffin, during an appearance on The View

• “I do think we’re in the middle of an attempted authoritarian overthrow of American democracy, I think everybody who predicted that is right.” — Rachel Maddow

• “Well, if you’re a white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man, you can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense.” — Susan Rice, who also says that “Anybody who fits the mold of somebody who is not a white Christian cisgender male, is by definition in this administration deemed inferior.”

• “That’s what Republicans want to do. They not only want to restore Jim Crow in the south, they want to have Jim Crow spread from one end of this country to the other.” — Chuck Schumer

• “I could code talk to white guys — watching football, fixing their truck, doing that, that I could put them at ease. I was the permission structure to say ‘look you can do this and vote for this.’” — Tim Walz, on why Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate

• “Look, we had the most qualified person who’d run for president in the country’s history at the top of the ticket. That in itself should have got this thing won.” — Also Tim Walz

• “A lot of Americans across the country that I run into, are questioning whether Donald Trump is actually fit at this point, to be able to carry out the duties of president and the commander in chief.” — Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

• “You know, first they came for the Latinos outside of the Home Depots, trying to get work so that they could feed their families. And I didn’t say anything about it because I’m not a Latino at the Home Depot. Then they came for the Hispanic-looking folks wearing hats backward with tattoos and they deported them to El Salvador. And I didn’t say anything about that because I don’t wear my hair [sic] backward and I don’t have any tattoos and I don’t look like a Latino.” — Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson

• “As an immunocompromised person, I don’t have the privilege of buying into far-right fascist denialism and eugenics. I’m one of those weak people you’re probably totally fine killing, because you probably haven’t worn a mask.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “Circling back: Should the incumbent party still pack the Supreme Court and abolish the filibuster and federally rewrite all the voting rules, or are those particular imperatives on hiatus?” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

• “The reason that they can sit there and take this vote and not even blink is because so many of them sit in privilege. When I look across the aisle, I think we have one person who may have a little bit of melanin.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, regarding the House GOP and the SAVE Act

• “One of the lessons I’ve learned is you have to read all the fine print. And you have to follow the threads of stories. Because if not, you’re going to be focused on talking about Greenland while [Trump] is trying to get the personal data of Americans, put them on the Cloud, sell it to China, go to the homes of undocumented immigrants who’re paying taxes, whatever it may be.” — Jen Psaki, during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”

• “It’s a real slippery slope. Trump does this to Harvard, and what’s president Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gonna do to a conservative school?” — CNN’s Jake Tapper

• “Was talking to a professor friend who said that they’ve referred 2 percent of their students for honor violations this year. Before AI, over more than a decade of teaching, they referred two. And the 2 percent are just the students who are too stupid to ask the AI to sound like a college student rather than a mid-career marketing executive. There are probably many more he hasn’t caught.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “California, I’m sorry to say this, a beautiful state, has become Exhibit A in progressive misgovernance.” — NYT’s Bret Stephens

• “Fox News has 15 of the 16 highest-rated cable news shows in April ratings. CNN doesn’t have a single show in the Top 25.” — Tom Bevan, President of RealClearPolitics

• “The impression of a ‘constitutional crisis’ is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration, but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch - limits the courts respected during the Biden administration.” — Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule

• “By aggregating votes across ballots and failing to distinguish between gender categories in a meaningful way, the DNC’s process violated its own Charter and Bylaws, undermining both fairness and gender diversity.” — Kalyn Free, a Native American attorney and Democratic party activist who lost a vice chair spot to David Hogg and is seeking to annul his election

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• The New York Times Magazine: “They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto and Got Caught Within a Month”

• GQ: “The Longest Night”

• The New Yorker: “The Trenchcoat Robbers”

• The New Yorker: “'Unsinkable”

• Tablet: “The Price”

• Atavist: “The Balloon That Fell From the Sky”

• The New York Times: “Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash”