Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Jul 18, 2025

**Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorganChase, speaks at a foreign ministry event in Dublin, Ireland. |** **The Irish Times**

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“Trump has those kind of voters. They are dedicated to him personally. They care more about him being happy than them being happy. They care more about him having what he wants than what they want. They will give their healthcare, they will let their daughters be destroyed, they will let their families be destroyed. There’s nothing he can’t do. He can drown them in Texas. He can take away their FEMA. He can do anything he wants to.” — Joy Reid
“I would say the state of our democracy.” — Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, when asked what keeps her up at night
“What I find puzzling and interesting about NPR is the same thing, in miniature, that I find puzzling about liberalism in many contexts: the utter inability to impose limits on itself, even when the failure to do so is obviously self-destructive. If NPR had even pursued its ideological agenda merely to the 80% level, rather than essentially to a 100% level, it wouldn’t be in the position it is now. But they just couldn’t help themselves. It’s like a dictator who rigs the election at 100-0, rather than the far more plausible 75-25 or some such.” — Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule
“There seems to be no real penalty for saying something that’s demonstrably false. It’s just ‘okay.’ No, it’s not. We have a trust deficit where because people don’t know if they can be sure somebody is telling the truth, why should I trust that person? So, we stopped trusting each other most of the time, and that’s dangerous also for our future.” — Former NIH Director Francis Collins
“Most people voted the wrong way because they were uneducated.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett
“The reality is that we are going to continue to face emergencies, especially since as we just got done with the big, ugly bill, they are clawing back those things that would have hopefully started to cool this planet down, because they don’t believe in science. The least that they could do is believe in helping American people. Unfortunately, we continue to see Republicans decide that they want to bury their constituents instead of actually doing everything that they can to make sure that they live amazing and full lives.”— Also Jasmine Crockett
“In free-speech societies there’s nothing that ‘must be said.’ As soon as an idea becomes mandatory (e.g. ‘diversity statements’), it’s wrong.” — Matt Taibbi
“I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots. I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works.” — JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon
“It might be hyperbolic for you as a white man. It’s certainly not hyperbolic for me as a Latino.” — CNN’s Ana Navarro, in response to conservative journalist Brad Polumbo saying it’s hyperbolic to call Trump’s second term a “reign of terror”
“This is literally superpower suicide.” — Susan Rice, regarding 1,300 State Department employees being laid off
“Looking at State Department documents, it appears the department went from 57,340 total employees in 2007 to 72,895 in 2015 to 80,214 in 2024. So it grew by nearly 23,000 employees before the ‘devastating’ cut of 1,300.” — Washington Examiner’s Byron York
“For those of us there, it was such a horror, because you saw an emerging America. I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave. Not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you could — you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people. They were coming for us. If [Trump] didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us.” — CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane, speaking about the Butler rally
“AC is quantifiably bad, but I think it’s also philosophically problematic. Cooling offers comfort, making the unbearable bearable, at least for now. That happens at a community level (no one is really disputing we should keep the very old, the very young and the vulnerable cool), but also individually. When you can buy a personal bubble of coolness and not truly feel the heat, the screaming urgency to tackle the collective issue of a world on fire can recede slightly.” — The Guardian’s Emma Beddington
“People who feel bad for JD Vance’s kids as family gets booed at Disneyland. I get it, but better those kids know now what their father is about. Other kids are watching their parents get shipped off to gulags.” — Clara Jeffery, editor in chief of Mother Jones
“I don’t want to hear anything ever in this country again about not being able to house people, no affordable housing. Because they put this thing up in eight days.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin, regarding Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” which is just a makeshift detention space featuring tents and trailers surrounded by razor wire
“Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
“The biggest scandal of the last 5 years isn’t that corporate media united to lie to the public about Biden’s cognitive decline, though that is a gigantic scandal. It’s that unelected people exploited it to run the country in secret in Biden’s name.” — Glenn Greenwald
“For Trump, ‘evil’ is no longer a word reserved for terrorists or immigrants but for domestic political opponents and journalists. And in casting his adversaries as evil, he is seeding the ground for threats of prosecution, imprisonment and deportation.” — NYT’s Peter Baker
“Republicans, they do not want us to succeed. And they were willing to bring the country down. I would say, we want President Trump to be successful. He’s not going to be, because he’s an idiot.” — Tim Walz