January
“But what I’m attracted to in hip-hop, what I’m attracted to in punk music, even rock ’n’ roll, is this kind of unabashed, ‘we’re stupid enough to try anything’ energy.' And I think it maybe started in the ’50s when kids first started making their own music. I think that’s a gift. No one else can reproduce that. And I think it has a window,” said André 3000, age 49. (NY Times, 01.02.25)
“Hashtag-resistance has turned into hashtag-capitulation,” said David Urban, a longtime Republican strategist and Trump ally. “The pink-pussy hats are gone, and they’re replaced by MAGA hats worn by Black and brown people.” (NY Times, 01.20.25)
“Innocent people are being pardoned in the morning, and guilty people are being pardoned in the afternoon,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said in an interview. “It is strange to receive a pardon simply for doing your job and upholding your constitutional oath of office. But the incoming administration has been consistently leveling threats.” (NY Times, 01.21.25)
“If this is the full-grown thing, it [monarchy] has to be a lot less high-toned and regal than they feared,” said Gene Healy, the senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute. “Boogieing with the Village People? Signing stacks of executive orders and pardons in a hockey stadium? There’s a heavily camp aspect to Trump’s performance of the presidency that monarchical metaphors miss.” (NY Times, 01.23.25)
February
“We’ve even got a mission statement now,” said Logan Lane, the Luddite Club’s founder, who is studying Russian literature at Oberlin College. “We like to say we’re a team of former screenagers connecting young people to the communities and knowledge to conquer big tech’s addictive agendas.” (NY Times, 01.23.25)
“Trump’s plan changed the subject from politics to what happens to the people,” Elliot Abrams, a past adviser to Republican presidents, said. “He spoke about how Gazans live now, and could live so much better in the future, and he did not demonize Gazans. So his plan is a reminder that the two-state solution is just foreign ministers shouting at each other, and it’s no solution at all.” (NY Times, 02.08.25)
“I was 100 percent behind him as a Canadian,” Joe Butler, a Canadian trucker said. “Now I just shake my head and say: Where are you going?” he said. “You just went and completely kicked us in the nuts. It’s scary.” (NY Times, 02.09.25)
“The direction to dismiss without prejudice [federal corruption charges] is not a reprieve for Mr. Adams,” wrote Zellnor Myrie, a Democratic primary candidate for mayor, “it is a gun to the head of the legitimate democratic governance of the City of New York.”(NY Times, 02.12.25)
“The final art product is merely the doo-doo, the refuse, the detritus of the creative experience,” David Edward Byrd said in his book, Poster Child: The Psychedelic Art & Technicolor Life of David Edward Byrd. “The golden moments in my life have always been the personal, magical world of the ‘Aha!’ moment.” (NY Times, 02.14.25)
“No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” wrote Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City,” in his resignation letter. (NY Times, 02.15.25)
“Satisfying the economic and emotional needs of this group [middle- and lower-class voters] is always the ostensible source of legitimacy of the antidemocratic movement, but it is never the actual goal,” writes Katherine Stewart in Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. (NY Times, 02.22.25)
“The promise of Biden, for his supporters, was to get rid of the element of politics that Trump represented,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton who organized “The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden: A First Historical Assessment.” “Not only did he not do that, but it’s not a successor to Trump that wins the election — it’s Trump” (NY Times, 02.27.25)
March
“We are not neighbors, we’re roommates,” said Agustin Barrios Gómez, a former Mexican congressman and a founding member of the nonprofit Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. (NY Times, 03.05.25)
“I wasn’t skin-deep gorgeous,” recalled Tim Curry about his Broadway debut in The Rocky Horror Picture Show 50 years ago. “I was gorgeous in attitude. And I was gorgeous, I think, in a certain kind of courage. It took a certain amount of courage to do the show in the first place, let alone translating it to New York.” (NY Times, 03.08.25)
“This [Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum’s tariff negotiations with the U.S.) is like a real life episode of ‘The Apprentice,’” said Mexican political analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor, referring to the 2000s reality series starring Mr. Trump. “The purpose of the whole show is to survive until the next episode, and she has been able to do that so far.” (NY Times, 03.15.25)
“People underestimate Canadians,” said Graydon Carter. “They mistake politeness and conviviality for weakness. Canadian winters are so brutal that after generations and generations of surviving those winters, Canadians have spines of steel. [Trump] would be wise to stay away from this in the same way Hitler made a mistake charging into Russia. If he does it in the winter, he’s going to lose. Canadians are good on ice.” (NY Times, 03.16.25)
“Democrats won the people who watch cable news and read newspapers,” said Representative Sara Jacobs (36) of California. “We lost the people who don’t feel like they’re part of politics at all. And so, how do we go to them, instead of keep trying to force them to come to us?” (NY Times, 03.16.25)
“[Doing it myself] felt very ’90s,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles. “It was that indie rock model: Get in the van, tour with the thing, get bodies in the seats. It made no money. But what it did do — and this is what I believe as a Gen X creative person — it confirmed my belief that continuing to make stuff is the path forward.” (NY Times, 03.30.25)
“What counts in Trump world are power and interests,” said Célia Belin, the head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign relations. “For Europe the choice may come down to this: Show teeth or give him what he wants.” (NY Times, 03.30.25)
April
“You never know when you’re in a golden age,” writes Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair, in his memoir. “You only realize it was a golden age when it’s gone.” (NY Times, 04.06.25)
“Nobody who is that rich and powerful has behaved that outrageously,” said John Gorenfeld, a software engineer who helped start a London-based group called Takedown Tesla. “There’s something campy and ridiculous about Musk’s brand of toxicity. And it opens up a real space to ridicule.” (NY Times, 04.07.25)
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” wrote Harvard president Alan M. Garber in a letter refusing to accede to demands by the Trump administration. (NY Times, 04.17.25)
“People say they want change in the Democratic Party, but really they want change so long as it doesn’t potentially endanger their position of power,” said
David Hogg, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. “That’s not actually wanting change. That’s selfishness.”
(NY Times, 04.17.25)
“Everyone was going crazy with seaweed a few years ago, and now no one is talking about it,” said Victoria Blamey, a Brooklyn chef who grew up in the beef-loving culture of Chile and Argentina. “It’s the steakhouse vibe: ‘I really don’t care about plant-based. I just want to have my steak and drink my Burgundy.” (NY Times, 04.23.25)
May
“He’d say [Pope Leo XIV, then a missionary in Peru] that a homily should be short and to the point, like a miniskirt,” said Elsa Ocampo, 81, a volunteer at the Our Lady of Montserrat church in Trujillo. (NY Times, 05.18.25)
“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” said Ed Smylie said in a documentary about saving the lives of Apollo 13 astronauts after an in-flight explosion imperiled their air supply. “That’s where we were. We had duct tape, and we had to tape it in a way that we could hook the environmental control system hose to the command module canister.” (NY Times, 05.20.25)
“If there’s one word that just comes out of this whole episode as it relates to Trump world and Biden world, it’s the poison of loyalty in democracy,” said former Representative Dean Phillips, who campaigned unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024. “Loyalty to a person rather than a constitution.” (NY Times, 05.20.25)
June
“If I’d been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others,” Edmund White wrote in City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 70s. (NY Times, 06.05.25)
“The Republicans are scared, the Democrats are stunned and leaderless, but I cannot imagine there will not be a reaction. The American people are facing one of the great challenges of the 21st century, as great as that confronting the French in 1940, when they had to decide whether to join the Resistance or not,” observed Claude Malhuret, 75, a French senator and former mayor of Vichy. (NY Times, 06.12.25)
“I use slivers of soap, I reuse paper clips, I use the backside of memos,”
Leonard Lauder, one of America’s hundred richest men, told
The Times in 2004. “You can take the child out of the Depression, but you can’t take the Depression out of the child.”
(NY Times, 06.17.25)
“Great architecture or not, that violent sacrifice, exacted from the buildings and people of a peaceful city, transfigured the towers and exalted them. If we value everything according to our feelings, it seems certain that
the destruction of the World Trade Center will stand in memory and sorrow alongside the bombing of Dresden and the explosion of the Parthenon,”observed architect and author
Nathan Silver.
(NY Times, 06.24.25)
“It’s officially hot commie summer,” hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb posted on Twitter after Zohran Mamdani appeared to win the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. (NY Times, 06.26.25)
July
“If you’re going to spend an eternity,”
Pete Hamill, a writer who chose to be buried near Boss Tweed in
Green-Wood Cemetery, once explained, “better with a rogue than with a saint who would drive you into slumber.”
(NY Times, 07.13.25)
“Fashion lives on the edge of tomorrow, driven not by what we know but the thrill of discovering what’s next,” wrote Balenciaga designer Demna on a note that he left on every chair at his final fashion show for the company. (NY Times, 07.13.25)
“There’s a difference between spending time and killing time,” said Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, deriding You Tube, his top competitor in the streaming wars,. “We’re in the how-you-spend-time business.” (NY Times, 07.15.25)
“Who could ignore quiche, a dish that is, today, “embodied” with queerness?, writes gay cookbook author Lukas Volger. “In 1948, it was just another recipe in the women’s pages of newspapers. But by the second half of the century quiche had became such a fixture of gay brunching that matters reached a tipping point. The widespread homophobic backlash was neatly captured by the 1982 publication of Bruce Fierstein’s tongue-in-cheek look at masculinity, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.” (NY Times, 07.20.25)
“It could be seen as Pollyanna today, but Pollyanna’s about the edgiest, most punk-rock thing you can be,” director James Gunn said. “I think the fine line is finding the humor in a person without making fun of him, because I think it’s honorable the way Superman is. I wish more people were more like that.” (NY Times, 07.26.25)
August
“By being vulnerable, he [Marc Maron] invites others to do the same. It has made his impending departure from podcasting a sad event for comedy nerds,” writes critic Jason Zinoman. (NY Times, 08.04.25)
“The United States has destroyed the global trade system it created and left nothing in its place but a set of ad hoc arrangements,” said Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “For trade, the result will be long-term instability that will be bad for business, bad for consumers and bad for global growth.” (NY Times, 08.02.25)
“[NY governor Kathy Hocul] has demonstrated an ability to work with men in power that, I think, has to do with her personal skills. She has total control over her ego,” said Kathryn Wylde, who leads the Partnership for New York City. “She doesn’t come off as a threat, but she’s tough as nails.” (NY Times, 08.16.25)
“You know, there’s a certain point at which you don’t want to hear ‘Happy Birthday,’”
Donald Trump said when he turned 78. “You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist.
” (NY Times, 08.20.25)
“Tons of food has gone into Gaza but Hamas savages stole it, ate lots of it to become corpulent,” Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, wrote on X, echoing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s criticisms on social media. (NY Times, 08.24.25)
September
“Ukraine must become a steel porcupine, undigestible for potential invaders,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, recently said about the country’s arms build-up, which is expected to cost $1billion every month. (NY Times, 09.03.25)
“Oh, the family and the food and the helicopters,” Mary Guibert recalled dreamily about being invited to the Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston wedding, after the actor had optioned Jeff Buckley’s life story. “It was pretty amazing to be sitting at a table where you know everyone’s name because you’ve either seen them in a film or you’ve bought their music and they don’t know you and you say, ‘I’m Jeff Buckley’s mom,’ and they go, ‘Oh, my god!’” (NY Times, 09.04.25)
“I see the house [where she had lived since 1965] as a vessel for an ongoing autobiographical exercise,” art world power broker Barbara Jakobson told New York magazine in 2021. “I keep the transformation as proof of life.” (NY Times, 09.07.25)
“I wonder how men would have reacted if their penis size had been posted along with their pictures,” actress, pin-up and Playboy model June Wilkinson (43-22-37) once asked. “Now that I am thinking about it, what a great idea.” (NY Times, 09.14.25)
“[Andy Warhol] became the model for how to be weird at the center of the high bourgeois society,” said artist Peter Halley. (NY Times, 09.19.25)
“Who cares if you die broke if you made something that you think is beautiful?” asks director Francis Ford Coppola in a documentary about Megalopolis, his eyewateringly expensive flop. (NY Times, 09.19.25)
“Museums exist in the real world,” Glenn Lowry, outgoing director of the Museum of Modern Art told donors at a retirement dinner in June. “They are willful efforts to imagine the world, through objects and programs that reflect their beliefs and commitments. In the months and years ahead, we will have choices to make that are consequential, perhaps more so than at any other time since the Second World War. If we believe in a museum that celebrates the values of pluralism, that honors freedom of expression, and protects minority rights and dissent,” Lowry went on, “then we will have to actively defend our values. If we want a museum that will collect and display the most daring and challenging artists of our time, then we will have to fight for that. If we want a museum that is a home for artists, scholars, curators and visitors from around the world, then we will have to speak out loudly for that.” (NY Times, 09.21.25)
October
“A lot of the people who do this [Middle East peace negotiating] are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats. It’s just different being deal guys — just a different sport,” Jared Kushner claimed after helping to broker a cease-fire in Gaza. (NY Times, 10.11.25)
“We now have a paradigmatic Gaza generation like we had a Vietnam generation and a Pearl Harbor generation,” said Shibley Telhami, a pollster and scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Maryland. “There’s this growing sense among people that what they’re witnessing is genocide in real time, amplified by new media, which we didn’t have in Vietnam. It’s a new generation where Israel is seen as a villain. And I don’t think that’s likely to go away.” (NY Times, 10.12.25)
“As we watch Mr. Trump lay waste to multiple generations of conservative dogma, it starts to become clear that ideology of any kind is inadequate to capture what is happening in the electorate,” writes Michael Hirschorn, the chief executive of Ish Entertainment. “Perhaps it’s time to turn the perspective from horizontal to vertical and start looking at politics not through the prism of left/right but instead top/bottom: the elites versus everyone else.” (NY Times, 10.14.25)
“It’s as if on a street appeared consumers who were blind, with no taste buds and a stomach made of iron,” said Maurizio Carta, Palermo’s official in charge of urban planning. “Businesses took advantage.” (NY Times, 10.19.25)
“Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.” (NY Times, 10.26.25)
November
“A trained-by-Dietrich dresser can function very nicely as handmaiden to a female impersonator of Sophie Tucker,” wrote Maria Riva, biographer of her mother, Marlene Dietrich. (NY Times, 11.04.25)
“My experience of politics in the last nine years has been a lot of people being mean to each other on Twitter,” said Katie Riley, Deputy Campaign Manager for Zohran Mamdani. “We wanted people to get out in the world together in real spaces.” (NY Times, 11.06.25)
“There are only two places in the world where that jacket could possibly belong,” Liza Minnelli said of Judy Garland's sequined garment. “With my family or at Carnegie Hall. So I’m glad it will finally be there, where Mama made it a part of her legacy.” (NY Times, 11.16.25)
“What OpenAI is engaged in is the most dramatic case of ‘Fake It Until You Make It’ that we have ever seen,” said Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson. “They are making huge commitments that they literally can’t afford.” (NY Times, 11.23.25)
“Why an icon?” actor Udo Kier, annoyed by how he was often described. “Why gay? Do they write in papers ‘a straight icon?’” (NY Times, 11.27.25)
“Why would you want to remove something because somebody broke the law and did something destructive?” said
Laurie Olin, a Philadelphia-based landscape architect whose résumé includes the redesign of Bryant Park in New York, the gardens around the Getty Center in Los Angeles and Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Calif. “I don’t mean to sound heartless, but what are you going to do about people behaving stupidly [a teenager fell to his death after climbing the
Seattle Gas Works, a fenced landmark]?
” (NY Times, 11.29.25)
“With creators no longer required to pursue artistic excellence,” W. David Marx writes in Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, “culture became a lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.” (New York Times, 11.29.30)
December
“Most of the images we see of the world are some form of propaganda,” British photographer Martin Parr told The Times of London in 2013. “Photography is about selling things, selling concepts. We’re so used to this now, so paralyzed by it, that when you actually see real people, they strike you as being strange and different. You should ask yourself why we are so used to seeing glamorized pictures of what people think they should look like.
“Even the simple family album is an idealized form,” he continued, “because you use it to sell an idea of your family as perfect: everyone’s smiling and having a great time, children are never crying. It’s the same with Facebook: Everyone’s always happy. So when I take pictures of real life, people say they look a bit weird.” (NY Times, 12.11.25)
“No chemo,” Barry Manilow shared on Instagram, announcing his surgical treatment for lung cancer. “No radiation. Just chicken soup and I Love Lucy reruns.” (NY Times, 12.24.25)
“I have drawers full of MetroCards that have, like, 10 cents on them,” said Kerri O’Connell, a native New Yorker and accessories designer who marked the demise of the MetroCard after 30 years with a MetroCard belt buckle. “Every jacket I have has a MetroCard in its pocket,” she said with a laugh. (NY Times, 12.27.25)
“Political leaders, statesmen, who once served as a firebreak against baser instincts increasingly see an opportunity to look receptive to the base — so they add kindling instead,” Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University, wrote in a newsletter on Substack.
(NY Times, 12.27.25)
“The individual has to yield,”
Robert Moses once argued, “to the advantages and needs of the majority of people.”
(NY Times, 12.29.25)
“E.V.s have become such a partisan thing that they’re not defined as cars,” said
Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who leads the EV Politics Project and EVs for All America, which aim to make
electric cars less political. “It’s like we’re having political fights over toasters.”
(NY Times, 12.30.25)
