Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Jane Fonda accepts the SAG Life Achievement Award onstage during the 31st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on February 23, 2025 in Los Angeles. | Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

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

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• “There’s zero evidence, from his life history, of Musk having anything higher than a 110 IQ.” — Seth Abramson

• “I told you all Jeff Bezos was feral. He’s now killed the Graham/Bradlee legacy of justice, the First Amendment and basic humanity in a vomitous spew of nonsense, testosterone fueled (and HGH) double talk that is more than a little pathetic and utterly shameless.” — Kara Swisher, on Bezos announcing that The Washington Post opinion page will now focus on defending personal liberties and free markets

• “If any of our former NATO or Five Eyes allies have intelligence data and assessments, which they surely must, about the background of the leader of their new strategic adversary, the United States, now is as good a time as any to release them, subject to protection of methods and sources, of course.” — George Conway

• “I am at the point where it has become really hard to have an intellectual debate with any of these people because the level of stupidity that they are displaying every single day is frankly, embarrassing. Not just in Congress, but as Americans. And the fact that these people are allowed to say just the most ridiculous things tells you that the dumbing of the United States has arrived, because how else do we get a Trump presidency again?” — Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, during an interview with Mehdi Hasan

• “When I think of the kids, like the 12 year old girl that can’t get an abortion, that’s what really rips me apart.” — Actress Natasha Lyonne, sharing her thoughts on the Trump administration’s first month during an interview at the 40th Film Independent Spirit Awards

• “We are not as naive as we once were, and the taste for Hollywood-style redemption arcs about finding your inner womanhood somewhere between arrest and the prison cell is dissipating. The public doesn’t seem as misty-eyed as back when a man putting on a dress was generally treated as a kind of secular canonisation. Awareness has been helped by greater statistical clarity about reality: for instance, that, according to recent figures, 70 per cent of trans-identified prisoners are incarcerated for sexual assault or violent crime, compared with about 19 per cent of the male prison population generally.” — The Times’ Kathleen Stock

• “I do not want to lose [Joy Reid] as a colleague here at MSNBC and personally I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call, and I understand that. But that’s what I think. I will tell you it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two — count ‘em: two — non-white hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows. And that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.” — MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (note that Joy Reid is being replaced with not one non-white host, or even two non-white hosts, but with three—Symone Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez)

• “Cancelling Joy Reid means the door she held open for the next generation of Black voices will slam shut. Without her, the next her, won’t get platformed by white media. That, of course, is why white media pushed her out.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “They didn’t even try to hide the racism by firing an unnecessary white anchor like Tur or Ruhle as cover.” — Keith Olbermann

• “By now it is impossible to ignore the crime rates of recent immigrants to Germany. In 2023, about 41 percent of crimes were thought to have been committed by foreigners.” — The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood

• “Woke just means you give a damn about other people.” — Jane Fonda, speaking at the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards

• “When push comes to shove, who is [Musk] going to be loyal to? South Africa, Canada, or the United States? Remember, he’s only been a citizen for 22 years.” — Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur

• “The fact that I am rooting for Canada and that I am rooting for Mexico a lot is really wild. But they are really the ones speaking truth to power right now.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “If you haven’t realized it yet, Trump and Musk are doing an open coup and purging the government of any guardrails as they assume authoritarian rule. But pronouns! Kamala is a woman! Woke!” — Wajahat Ali

• “The left, not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the ‘Resistance’ to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support.” — The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle

• “The prices at the grocery store are going up because democracy is being taken away.” — Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, during an appearance on MSNBC

• “It took Trump only three days to eclipse the 141 questions former President Biden took in his first month; Trump took 164 questions by the end of his third day.” — National Journal’s George E. Condon Jr.

• “If you look at the food that’s on your table, think about who picked it. If you look at your homes, think about who built them. If you look at your vulnerable elders and your kids, think about who’s taking care of them.” — Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, speaking about deportations at the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Tax the Greedy Billionaires Press Conference on Tuesday

• “In Trump’s Washington, a Moscow-Like Chill Takes Hold” — NYT headline

• “This is a full campaign to purge all LGBTQ employees from the federal government. This is a second lavender scare.” — Harvard Law School clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo, regarding the City Journal investigation on “NSA’s Secret Sex Chats,” in which intelligence agency employees used the Intelink messaging program to discuss piss fetishes, gangbangs, artificial vaginas, etc.

• “If we’re going to brag about immigration going down, there might be another reason it’s going down, because you’re threatening people. You’re threatening their lives.” — The View’s Whoopi Goldberg

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

• The New York Times: “The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself”

• 1843: “The warlord, the oligarch and the unravelling of Russia’s Amazon.com”

• Wired: “The Rise & Fall of Silk Road”

• Wired: “The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians”

• The New Yorker: “The Shipwreck Detective”

• The Wall Street Journal: “The Small Town Tearing Itself Apart Over Preferred Pronouns”

• Bloomberg: “Grand Theft Auto: Real Life”

• The Atlantic: “How the Economists Took Over the NBA”