Ezra Klein Quotations

My only advice is to try to get the job that's most like the job you want, rather than the one that's more prestigious. Always try to be the talent.

If I'm sitting around exulting over traffic data, I'm an idiot.

When I talk to people about 'KnowMore', it is as an experiment. The biggest thing I'll say there is that we've learned a lot from 'KnowMore'.

It's not a good idea to conceptualize a static relationship with long-standing policies, like health care.

Every newspaper in the country covers stories that other newspapers cover. Every industry is filled with people who are competing to do the best job providing a particular service.

One of my big beliefs about Washington is that we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly underrate seeing Washington as a system, in general, but, in particular, we highly underrate the power of Congress,

People set newspapers on fire; they use them for wrapping fish. The Internet does not have that property. What I don't think we've gotten is that you can make things last longer than in print.

I think it's weird that the news cedes so much ground to Wikipedia. That isn't true in other informational sectors.

My career wouldn't exist without blogs, electronic text, hyperlinks, and mass online audiences.

The idea of changing and fixing the problem of how news is presented on the Internet has been recognized for a long time.

The thing to remember about being young is you eventually get old.

When I first came to Washington, what I admired most was that people were just really, really smart with a tremendous amount of intellectual horsepower and the ability to look at an issue and say something fresh.

When you're trying to come up with a good approach to reporting on the bleeding edge of where the conversation's moving, you're just leaving a lot of people who aren't on the bleeding edge of that conversation out.

I don't trust this [american] government to be regulating corporations. I trust big business to be regulated [by itself] and to be a party to a decent solution.

Even more fundamental than housing to the global financial economy is the idea that the U.S. government is a safe asset.

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that's unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't 'too soon.' It's much too late.

We're actually just moving one type of deficit to another. But, the problem with this second type of deficit is that you drive on it and then it falls down.

Obamas finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They dont even really inspire. They elevate. . . . He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh . . . Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves.

A government shutdown, it isn`t the end of the world. It`s a bad thing. The government stops working for a few days. We cover it a lot. Polls turn against who ever made it stop working.

If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.

The American political system is not good at trading sacrifice now to prevent crises later.

You are never going to have, in a country as rich as ours [the USA], that borders a country as poor as Mexico, an end to immigration. You just won't. The question is, if you make it humane and if you make it regulated. It's much better for an American worker to compete against a regulated immigrant inside labor standards, than it is to ever to compete against an illegal immigrant.

If it's cynical, risky politics that brings a lighted match and a can of gas near the Democratic coalition, it should be named as such, and its consequences understood, and it should become part of the complex calculus we're all building to help us understand these campaigns.

We were badly held back not just by the technology, but by the culture of journalism.

Everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.