David Plotz Quotes

#1. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

David Plotz

#2. The Christians think I am making a mistake by not trying the New Testament and meeting Jesus. The Jews tend to think I am making a mistake by reading without support from educated people. After all, there is 2,000 years of scholarship about the book, they say, so it's perverse of me to ignore it.

David Plotz

#3. People who tend to invest are either going to invest in something where you're raising $5 million or they're going to invest in something where you're raising $1 million, but if you're trying to raise $2.5 million it's kind of a weird amount.

David Plotz

#4. The process of just being in front of people, having to stand up for your ideas, and ask - and then ask people for money, which is a very hard thing to do.

David Plotz

#5. When you have spent too much time with something, you may lose sight of what's marvelous about it.

David Plotz

#6. I know I would have learned a huge amount had I read the Bible with my rabbi. But I also would have missed a huge amount, and I would have been guided down the narrow paths where the rabbi led me, not the paths that I chose for myself.

David Plotz

#7. I'm very lucky to be able to work in print and radio. I'm very lucky to be able to work at a time when finance and economics are really important. And the number of people who tell finance and economic stories in a kind of accessible storytelling way, there's much more demand than there is supply.

David Plotz

#8. I feel like there's lot of people who know finance and economics better than I do. There are lots of people who are better storytellers than I am. But the space that I occupy of storytelling about finance and economics is - more people want it than can do it.

David Plotz

#9. When you're writing for the New York Times someone reading it knows the topic better than you do and knows when you've messed up.

David Plotz

#10. One problem with how we think about the Bible is that people tend to jam it into narrower categories, when in fact it is many things all at once.

David Plotz

#11. Having good relations with lots of lots of different people helps a lot.

David Plotz

#12. I made one choice, for example, which is I'm just going to confine work to working hours. I'm not going to work on the weekend. I'm not going to be working while I'm with my son in the morning and in the evening.

David Plotz

#13. Any suggestion that Mexicans are fundamentally different from Americans should be taken as racist on its face; America, after all, is a pluralistic society, and Mexico is hardly the alien civilization that some (really, just Samuel Huntington) would suggest.

David Plotz

#14. I sound like an evangelist or something.

David Plotz

#15. It's much easier to hire really great people like that in New York and in Brooklyn in particular, than it is in Washington.

David Plotz

#16. I have blocks of time where I'm working intently on something.

David Plotz

#17. My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each

David Plotz

#18. I'm going to have a project-based life rather than a job-based life.

David Plotz

#19. The New York Times is the greatest media company around, arguably, and the people at the New York Times know a lot more about making a giant successful media company than I do.

David Plotz

#20. I want to have enough space to, I don't know, think thoughts. I mean, I just - I don't know that I'm capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that's worth a column.

David Plotz

#21. I think I did 97 pitch meetings, and even at the 97th meeting, there were questions I was getting that I hadn't had in the - you know, any of the 96 preceding ones.

David Plotz

#22. People found it unusual to leave a job where you're the boss.

David Plotz

#23. Writing a column, a weekly column for the New York Times, is really tough, and I wasn't prepared for the demands that that involved.

David Plotz

#24. I'm so grateful to Hugo Lindgren, Jon Kelly, and the people who gave me the opportunity to write a weekly column. It's an amazing thing to do, and when I started they both said, you know, the problem with columns is they just exist forever.

David Plotz

#25. What is Atlas Obscura? So, it was a small digital media company. It's an atlas, it's literally like, an atlas of places, wonderful, unusual places.

David Plotz

#26. That economics and finance are often covered as technical subjects, sort of boring subjects, and either you already know a lot about it and you follow it, or you don't know much about it and you don't want to know.

David Plotz

#27. On one project I was hanging out with Brad Pitt, and Ryan Gosling, and Steve Carrel, and Christian Bale, and trying to explain economics to them for a movie I'm an advisor on.

David Plotz

#28. I do think there will be winners and losers in the 21st century economy.

David Plotz

#29. I think I developed a culture of healthy skepticism of claims of certainty on any side of the aisle. A sort of boldness in using economics no matter where it leads you in political circles, you know, rather than worrying about being left-wing or right-wing or biased or this or that.

David Plotz

#30. I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.

David Plotz

#31. Slate is not a political magazine but a lot of what it does is politics.

David Plotz

#32. Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others.

David Plotz

#33. God is erratic, sometimes vindictive, sometimes merciful. The people I was taught were heroes - Jacob or Moses or David - were ambivalent figures, or worse. But that messiness was joyful, and challenging. I loved having a Bible that I could argue with.

David Plotz