“The change with After Virtue, however, is that in an important sense [MacIntyre] turns against modernity as a whole. He argues that the move to modernity involves the destruction of morality—that in modernity we no longer know what we’re talking about when we deploy moral language.”
“Obviously elections are political in terms of who wins and loses, but the process should not be political.”
“In all other religions, you have people who become atheists. Only in Christianity, God himself goes through this experience.”
“There is such a thing as progress. I am no Pollyanna, and human nature doesn’t change much, but there’s undoubtedly progress.”
“Yes, as you mentioned, one of the most interesting findings of Lament for a Nation, which came out in 1965—it’s Grant’s most famous book—is that in Grant’s view, there’s really no such thing as American conservatism.”
“For example, with a container of yogurt, I know its price, calories, calcium content, and vitamin content. But if I need a hip replacement, I have no data to judge the quality of the physician, hospital, or other sites where the surgery might be performed.”
“[My book seeks to] disrupt science in the sense that it gets us away from the myth that doing more physics and chemistry will be the answer to understanding the living and, in particular, the human being.”
“One of the really significant differences in terms of how young people are being raised today and their formative and teens years and previous generations is how slowly they’re reaching major milestones, such as getting married [and] owning a home, the sort of signs of adulthood…”
“So you see why people are not satisfied: I don’t propose simple solutions. In my old age, I’m returning from Marx to Hegel.”
“Hamas wants to maximize the death of its civilian population. The purpose is to get the international community, the United Nations, the United States, other governments around the world, to condemn Israel, to vilify Israel, to delegitimize Israel, and undermine the Jewish state in that way.”
“The feminists have deserted Jewish women. And it wasn’t just Jewish women. There were Arab Muslim women, and there were Thai Buddhist women. No doubt many Christian women or some Christian women who were also raped, murdered, and kidnapped.”
“Meaningful work is as important to life as leisure, I think. I just think that we’ve lost the balance.”
“The so-called conservative movement of the 1980s was anything but conservative.”
“The most common precursor of gender dysphoria, though, seems to be intense social media use. The gender dysphoria more often seems to stem from that rather than from the home.”
“Humphrey’s insurgency at the convention basically lashed Truman to the mast of [Humphrey’s] own civil rights agenda. And desegregating the armed forces was arguably the single most important civil rights cause of that moment in time.”
“There really hasn’t been anybody like him since he passed…This is why there are these long compilations of ‘Hitchslaps’ on YouTube. It’s why most of the tributes to him focus on his rhetorical prowess—and just his brilliance on the debate stage.”
“Regulating your own emotions is something most people are capable of doing…It doesn’t require you constantly expressing [a problem], thinking about it, [and] sharing it with everyone…There’s something about not fixating too much on your own problems and really dwelling on them but, instead, doing s
“One thing I’ve learned [from] being in combat sports is that it’s internationally watched everywhere, in every country.”
“The great thing is the universe is as amazing as it is without all of the fairytales. The universe is far more amazing than anything that has come up in any scriptural book because the imagination of nature is much greater than the imagination of human beings.”
“We will be nothing like the way we are now. It will be like a night and day transformation. And it always does require violence because, as you said, that class or race enemy that stands in the way of future bliss simply has to be gotten rid of.”
“There is a lot of hope. Every time I go there and meet with the new generation, I think that they definitely want for their country to be a successful one. And that’s the conversation in Iraq. Most people have now forgotten about the war.”
“I’d be very surprised if a super intelligent AI a thousand years from now cannot recreate everything. Also, like so many other people, including Elon, I believe there’s probably a 50% chance we’re in a simulation. So, that would defeat the idea of death as well.”
“There [are] ways to teach about the past that are humanistic; that are agency-focused; and that are focused on generative things rather than destructive things—rather than dismantling things and tearing things down with no plan forward of what happens after the destruction.”
“All of the sudden, I was on the phone with Mike Pence… ‘I just finished Old Abe last night, and I had to track you down and tell you how much I loved it, and it’s the best book about Lincoln I’ve ever read.’ And, for ten minutes, he just wanted to talk about Lincoln.”
“You could read my book…as a kind of homage to the magazine.”
“And my argument is that freedom and progress in the context of the cyborg era are actually inimical to women’s interests. They don’t make things better for any women, except [for] a very small, elite subset.”
“I’m not optimistic at all that campuses can be reformed. They certainly cannot be reformed from within…Academia is gone. It is a monoculture. It is a hermetically sealed bubble.”
“It’s career ending, really…Anybody who tries to [speak out] will be shunned.”
“Scientific conferences are being determined based on sex and race. It’s going to slow down medical progress, and it is also going to put physicians in the ER and the operating room who are not the top qualified.”
“And, later in life, when I was dealing with my father coming out of prison and perhaps rekindling that relationship, I started to look at my experience slightly differently. I started sharing bits and pieces of my story with people and, to my surprise, found that some of the reactions were positive
“Any coherent system of morality begins with an appreciation of human dignity and wanting people to have as many choices to take control of their lives as possible.”
“My father’s skin is in those pharmaceutical companies.”
“Conservatives are certainly not socialists. Conservatives do not believe, as the Marxists do, that you can open up some central office with really bright people and dictate the course of the entire economy of the nation. We don’t believe anything like that. On the other hand…”
“Sometimes, I would even dream about some of the people I had interviewed on the stories. And, so through the years, I had the idea to write a book and put it all together and try to return to some of the stories.”
“The ten out of a thousand entrepreneurial ideas that are amazing—we’ll find out what those are. And they will be the ones that dominate [in] the next generation.”
“I don’t see a full, vigorous pivot by this President (and this White House) back toward the themes and approaches that Joe Biden articulated in his 2020 presidential race.”
“Ron Paul is so beloved because he is so principled. That is what we are focused on here. We will work with other people who share our interests, but we’re not going to sacrifice our principles to do it.”
“At the end of the day, it’s a pretty simple business that we’re in: We want to understand culture, we want to understand consumers’ thinking, and we’re just trying to answer why’s.”
“Every generation, we need to learn and relearn how thin the line can be between having a basically liberal society and a basically authoritarian society.”
“No one is exempt from being a victim of some sort of crime. And it’s very appropriate that I use that title [of victim] in terms of the VICTIM Act.”
“My wife and I used to go vacation in San Francisco. We don’t anymore…This is what’s headed toward the rest of the nation.”
“You have to have a steel spine in your liberalism. ‘What kind of government did you create, sir?’ ‘We created a republic, if [you] can keep it.’ The ‘if you can keep it’ part requires a steel spine.”
” I think that we are, as always, pragmatic idealists.”
“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with debate. In fact, debate, in certain circumstances, can be good, but we can often solve the problems…through conversation.”
“Eventually, I had an emotional crisis because I could no longer reconcile the life of abundance that the U.S. afforded me. I made a pact with myself that from here on, I’m really going to try to see what needs to happen for [Africa] to thrive.”
“Too often, people think of corruption as something that happens somewhere else: in Russia, in authoritarian regimes.”
Henri Mattila and Erich Prince tell the story of Merion West.
“I got the call on January 10th [2017] from CNN and then BuzzFeed about them running with this hoax. I pointed out at the time that it was wrong. I could demonstrably prove it was wrong. And yet, they stuck by it…”
“I think the downside of going test-optional, the downside of ignoring what assessments tell you, means that you might end up ignoring the underlying structural problems and never fixing the inequities.”
“To understand how land use regulation can help save California from the dystopian future it is currently facing, I spoke with Nolan Gray, an urban planner and outspoken land use policy wonk.”
“This brings in the status issue again, doesn’t it? Because there are so many careers that people just wouldn’t consider because how would they tell their friends?”
“But one of the dangers is it’s very easy when there is change that makes someone uncomfortable to immediately say that this is a society that’s in decline and to blame somebody for causing it.”
“The other fans that have a dangerously inaccurate idea about what it means to be Stoic are the ‘Broics.’”
“We lost the All-Star Game, but I think we won the battle because that fight has moved to other states now because we are on the right side of this issue, and we push back so hard.”
“The long-term problem there is that if your feminism becomes associated with anti-natalism, sooner or later it’s going to trigger a backlash, and that backlash is not going to look very nice for women.”
“What I have found in the book is strong enough to suggest that there is a correlation between mass migration from Muslim-majority countries and the increase in sexual violence.”
“Interest group pressure typically opens up immigration.”
“Secondly, I’d say good advice is to gain familiarity with the saints and to perhaps gain some friends among the saints because often they are the best examples.”
“One of the reasons our anti-poverty efforts in America don’t do better is we start too late. We need to help kids early on.”
“If you look through the films, it’s a propaganda machine, where identity politics is always featured. There’s no space there for just a common universal story, which is the appeal to human frailty or common ground.”
“Well, the first paragraph basically says it all. It begins with ‘The continued unity of the United States of America cannot be guaranteed.’”
“I’m Robert Jensen. I’ll be your guide into the restless and relentless mind of Wes Jackson. I first bumped into Wes’ work more than three decades ago, and his ideas have had a profound influence on my thinking about society and ecology.”
“I go through a whole analysis of that and why—statistically speaking—you’re basically making a very broad statement about white people in general based on one observation in one Jeopardy! episode.”
“In the battleground states, since 2000, Republicans have won the popular vote four out of six times. In fact, Donald Trump—in 2020—won the battleground states by over 2.1 million votes.”
“And he wrote this very famous novel called Infinite Jest, which he described as a very sad book about the pursuit of happiness. And so, I think in some ways, I’ve written a very sad book about the pursuit of happiness as well.”
“I think there’s great potential in video games. In some ways, they are the primary space in which the culture wars are now being fought.”
“And so I remembered from college: When you’re facing a problem that seems deeply puzzling, go back to fundamentals, go to first principles. So I took Aristotle’s Politics off my shelf, my old college copy, and reread it in the context of the election of Donald Trump.”
“And so I think we have to resist the tendency to try to define a new administration’s foreign policy mainly as an opposition to the administration that came before it.”
“The UCMJ has some key aspects to it which do not afford military personnel the same degree of presumption of innocence that you’d see in a civilian court.”
“The way we farm and the way we think are connected—that’s our premise.”
“One of the big issues was health care reform; my own parents struggled with the cost of prescription medications, using up all of their discretionary income to pay for my father’s insulin and other medications.”
“It’s clear that so many cities are going through a lot of the same challenges that New Haven is facing right now.”
“I studied Elizabethan England as a graduate student. It was a society governed by ideas of honor, and I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe some of those ideas could be returned to usefulness.’”
“He was the first to negotiate with Native Americans as a Christian, keeping the Christian-Quaker pacifist traditions in his negotiations. He actually regarded the Native Americans as equals…”
“Al Davis used to say, ‘Just win, baby.’ And I tell you that’s what Americans do best. Once we wake up, once we’re engaged, once we know that our culture is at risk, we come together and start communicating. Across-party lines, Democrats and Republicans start to talk, and we rise.”
“Do you realize how strange it is that professionals can move around Europe more freely than they can in the U.S.? And that overall, Alabama has more autonomy over its regulations than France does?”
“And I’ll have to say this: This was the worst job I ever had, but it was one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
“Policies that try to tackle diversity problems make it always salient in people’s minds. And that can backfire, even if well-meant.”
“How can I say I care about what I’m doing if I’m not willing to put myself in situations that might make me uncomfortable?”
“[Historically,] Islamic societies were actually more advanced, more liberal, and more tolerant than Western societies. So, there is nothing intrinsic to Islam that explains these problems.”
“Once the stage is the thing, ideas don’t matter as much as performance.”
“The problem is, though, we can’t rely on volunteerism, donations, and gifts for much longer because—quite frankly—most of these places are getting pretty tapped out.”
“In polarized times, think of the other person as an individual and not member of the other group.”
“But there is no question that we’ve got some major issues, and free speech is so dependent these days on these big tech companies, so they have to be very careful that free speech is protected. And, of course, there’s a pattern now that shows otherwise…”
“I was in poverty once, and then I became an entrepreneur. And now I am running for office…This is the greatest country in the world.”
“Maybe there are some lessons learned, so this never happens again.”
“This is an attempt at a social, cultural, and political revolution.”
“Political ideas are too abstract. They are not enough to make people emotional about identity. Swiss identity has a cultural element.”
“Our system in United States is set up in a way that forces us to compromise. The Founders thought the great threat to a democracy is factionalism.”
“I have never been more depressed about the state of truth in the world.”
“His interrogators were telling him that we have gangs who could ‘stab your daughter or wife in London.’”
“On her ouster from The Daily Orange, the student journalist says: ‘It also affects me as student because all my peers have banded together and tried to cancel me.’”
“They reject ideas of the extreme, so that’s why there needs to be a delineation between what’s extreme and what’s not extreme.”
Listen to our conversation with the candidate to hear how his platform can tackle the greatest problems facing the United States today.
“There has been a huge transfer of wealth to the rich and gradual collapse of the middle class. That’s made a lot of people anxious.“
“The police issue here now is a local issue, and we will let them work it out. If I was a president now, I would say no, we not not need to do something.”
“The last time a leading Danish politician was murdered was 1286. It’s not war with your foreign enemies [that matters]; it’s internally, in political stability.”
“I think people want to know the story behind things. And I think part of what they’re buying into is the story of our family on our ranch. And so it’s beautiful to be able to share that in some small way.”
“My sense is that most people—even people who truly abhor a lot of the stuff that I write—were supportive and were sort of horrified by the decision and by what happened.”
“And I have a choice right now: Do I vote for Joe Biden, a white guy who locked black people up? Or do I vote for President Donald Trump, a white guy who happens to be a Republican, who let black people out of jail and gave them a second chance?”
“For the ‘Signaling When No One Is Watching,’ basically what we were interested in was motivated by previous research suggesting that people are strongly motivated to signal to others that they’re morally good.”
“So, I finished my Ph.D. in 2017, and, at the time, Donald Trump had just been elected President of the United States. Like a lot of people, I was a bit perplexed and disturbed by what happened.”
“I was surprised at the depth of their depravity in attacking this innocent academic. He also provoked quite a bit of outrage by refusing to be silenced by them—and thank God for that.”
“Human nature is to seek power; we’ve had that since the Stone Age. That’s just part of human behavior. But, as transhumanists, we seek to go beyond that kind of thing.”
“I’m not a disciple of Dr. Peterson’s. But he has inspired and helped to heal me with his words, and I admire him most for the example that he’s set with his own life: the courage to stand up, with shoulders back and face the darkness.”
“I’ve read Peterson’s Twelves Rules for Life, and it has some points that I agree with. But I don’t think he goes far enough.”
“I would say the social aspects of making the film were really difficult for me because a lot of my network and friends and social circle is progressive, and, obviously, progressives are not a fan of [Peterson’s].”
“…what I’ve noticed with Jordan is that his interactions with this polarization of the Left and the Right—it’s actually kind of hardened him. It’s made him a little bit more radical. It’s made him a little bit more hard-skinned.”
“Yeah, there’s not a lot of lying in Jordan. That’s part of what I was trying to say with the fact that he doesn’t do small talk. If he wants to talk to you, he’ll talk to you. And sometimes the first thing he’ll ask you is something kind of serious.”
“Actually, the two things that ex-Muslims let go of—the very last two things that they let go of—are eating pork and anti-Semitism. It’s because both of these things are so ingrained in us from such a young age.”
“What I was not prepared for was the tsunami of just hate and pushback and disdain that would come from people I thought were my people: people that believed in enlightenment values, Western values, and liberal values.”
“That was one of the things the campaign was good at: trying to get as much controversy as possible by provoking conflicts. It’s not an honorable way to go through campaigning, but it worked. Better than you could say for Tim Ryan.”
“If you have to take your kids and you have to go into a parking lot of a library in order to do homework, that is not something that they want to have to deal with.”
“First of all, I think we should make [the census] a fun process, where people, families engage in it [together], particularly in hard to count districts and communities.”
“[Some of my students] couldn’t do all three: commute, work, and schoolwork. So, I saw the affordability problem growing and growing in that setting, but I hear it also from my constituents in every higher education setting.”
“America is an experiment in democracy like none other. I do believe in American exceptionalism. They spoke about many things, but one of the things that they spoke about was the fact that we should never be overly reliant on political parties.”
“Like [how] the Southern District of New York became the hub for financial crimes, the Northern District of Georgia has become a hub for online financial crimes and cybersecurity because it all runs through our network.”
“And things like rural broadband, having quality health care, just a good quality of life, good ability to get a great education—whether it’s going into a technical field college or university setting. We had a lot of different options for folks, and we’re slowly moving the needle.”
“When he went to the VA to get help, they told him that their next mental health appointment was in 3 months—even though he was thinking of committing suicide that very night. That’s unacceptable.”
“I knew the consequences of looking into public corruption. You’re not going to make many friends, and you’re certainly going to make many enemies.”
“That’s where I think it’s a real difference, that you actually have somebody running that can actually win a Republican district nearly 2 to 1 without spending a dime on a campaign.”
“We need to go back to what the Founding Fathers and Mothers had in mind: a citizen-legislator—somebody that comes here, tries to get results, and then goes home and lets the next person try.”
“I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, because you don’t understand, I’m not your typical Democrat.”
“They slid a note, children with a note under the door and said, ‘How can we help you?’”
“I have no differences when people produce outcomes.”
“And some talk is floating around right now about merit-based immigration. Individuals like my parents would have been at the bottom, the end of the line, and would perhaps never have had an opportunity, and yet they helped build the agriculture sector.”
“Doing that mental exercise of seeing if you could rephrase somebody else’s argument in your own words—that alone might be one of the single most useful things that you can do to reason better and to respond to people’s arguments better.”
“So I’m going to answer your question, but I want to preface it by saying most people do not vote on policies. They think they do, but they don’t. Even smart, educated people who think they do even more so don’t.”
“When I’m speaking of a good society, I’m not necessarily speaking of a good society in the 21st century. I’m speaking of a kind of good society that we have a blueprint to make, that is, in turn, written in our genes.”
“One thing is for sure in Washington is, no matter how tight or tough times are, veterans are a class to themselves; they are an issue to themselves. Partisanship rarely ever creeps into the VA.”
“So Buttegieg, in what that reveals of him, is that he’s a classic puppet of the military industrial complex.”
“Photojournalism—and photography in general—is based on a trusting relationship: the relationship between the photographer and the subject. And, in order to really get several layers deep, the photographer needs to reveal their sensitive side.”
“In my district, I wasn’t just Tom Davis—I was ‘Mr. Woodrow Wilson Bridge.’ I was the guy who closed Morton and got 3,000 acres donated to the county. Those were the kinds of tangible efforts where people may not like my party, but they saw some redeeming qualities in me to keep me around.”
“In my opening statement I said, ‘In thirty years of public service, I never had a scandal.’ The murmur of boos in the audience—I guess they saw that as a dig at the other candidates.”
“I told one of the other senators, ‘You’re a very pleasant, sweet person. But deep down, the public wants a son-of-a-gun. You’ve got to get stuff done.’”
“Most of all, I just want my constituents back home to know that I’m working for them, and that I’m not thinking about contributions from a big corporation when I’m in a committee hearing and questioning witnesses and when we’re voting on matters that are important to the working families in my dist
“There’s not a single one of us who has not made mistakes in our lives, and we have a number of people who were in jails and prisons that made mistakes that they regret.”
“It’s harder to demonize somebody if your kids are playing on the soccer field together, and you’re out there on a weekend afternoon.”
“It’s hard to point to me as an anti-gun person. I’ve got a gun safe full of them! Every year, when we have the competition for skeet, trap, and sporting clays, Democrats vs. Republicans, I always walk away with the trophy.”
“On campuses so far, I have been pleasantly surprised that I have been invited to talks that have been well-received and civil.”
“I am, first and foremost, a public servant to my district—not a Democrat or anything else.“
“My reputation is, ‘Every conservative’s favorite liberal.’ That’s because I don’t hate people because I disagree with them.”
“People who read us will gain a better perspective overall of the issues that we produce. Why wouldn’t we want to be as influential as possible?“
“Around that time, there was the 2008 financial crisis. A lot of people in New York publishing were let go, and my contract with Macmillan seemed to be in jeopardy.”
“In the Democratic caucus, we elected more new women than men. Think of that statement!”
“In a sense, the Founding Fathers feared democracy because of the tendency of people to be carried away by their passion and easily led astray by demagogues, and I think that our modern polarization, augmented by social media, could well bring their worst fears to reality.”
“I think reciprocity is a very important part of a friendship or, in fact, any type of relationship. I think having a balance where both of you are investing equal amounts of time and energy and love and attention into that relationship is really important.”
“…Areo is bipartisan; it doesn’t take a side. I personally find that I agree with about 25% of the pieces I put out. The other 75%, I think they’re good, but I’m not convinced by their arguments ultimately.”
“You can’t take politics out of the judicial process because judges are human.”
“I had an old chief master sergeant tell me that when you first enter a job, you should keep your mouth shut for three months…So I have a lot to learn.”
“One of the basic concepts I had was that if there are some benefits to having some depression manic symptoms; the corollary is that there are some limitations to being normal and mentally healthy.”
“People are going to use, so let’s teach them how to use and limit the use correctly. This limits the damage and harm they can do to themselves until they reach a path of recovery.”
“Any bill that’s passed by 100% Republicans and no Democrats or 100% Democrats and no Republicans is not the best piece of legislation that could have been forged.”
“I was multitasking, and as one person came up to ask a question, I almost hit send on a $20,000 transaction. It was a scary moment, because if it happened there is no way to cancel it, and you have to say, ‘Listen, good friend, can you send it back to me?’”
“I have taken a pledge not to accept any corporate tax money. One of the first and most important reasons I took that pledge is because I think that the influence of ‘Big Pharma’ is far too great in our legislative body in Washington.”
“I suggest that the ebbing of polarization has already been occurring. We’re just not aware of it because of what’s presented to us in the media. If you look at the polling numbers, Democrats and Republicans are minorities; the plurality of Americans identify as independents.”
“The last four or five years I was in the Senate, there was simply no Democrat more conservative than any Republican and no Republican more liberal than any Democrat. And that’s just wrong. It’s unnatural.”
“Even if you continue to disagree on 90% of the issues, if you have a little bit of trust, understanding, and empathy, you might find common ground on that 10% or wherever you do have some agreement.”
Bernadette Scarduzio, who lives with a rare neurological disease, argues that medical marijuana has helped normalize her life and has the potential to help reduce opiate overuse in the disabled community.
“You can’t be a Neo-Nazi and be happy in life. It’s 100% impossible to be those two things at the same time.”
“In fact, one of my best training grounds was being a basketball referee. That taught me how to make tough decisions under tough circumstances where you already knew you were going to make half the people mad most of the time.”
“So unless you are Seymour Hersh, who has The New York Times backing him, or some young activists or aspiring journalist who’s willing to work an issue, [thorny issues such as these medical experiments] can fall through the floorboards.”
“We try to take away the value judgments because economics is not designed to make a value judgment—that’s not the tools that we have in this discipline.”
“The vast majority of political parties in Brazil have no ideology whatsoever. They are crony parties who trade political and economic favors, and they do so with those who offer more, regardless of principles or values.”
“I have no desire to be president for example. But in that one aspect, I’m motivated or inspired to have my character better reflect [Lincoln’s] character. Not bring him down to my level but bring my character up to his level.”
“In Congress, no matter how strongly I agree with somebody on some issues, I’m going to strongly disagree on others. But, it is this stance that has enabled the ACLU to work in odd bedfellow coalitions to advance our agenda.”
“[Feminism today sometimes] sees the world as a zero-sum struggle between Venus and Mars. But most women want equality, not war. Men aren’t their adversaries. They are their brothers, sons, husbands, and friends. We are in this together.”
“…Politicians are regular people who should not be expected to be more moral in their political lives than their economic lives. If we have this assumption that people in politics are no better than people in markets, this leads to a lot less confidence that political solutions will be any better th
“When we look back on honor cultures like the Mafia…They embrace values that are precisely what are lacking in our lives—like that fierce, passionate loyalty that Sonny has. He’s not thinking about his own self-interest. He’s thinking about the fact that that guy beat up his sister, and he needs to
A photograph Ron Haviv took at age 23 would be cited by George H.W. Bush when the President called for the American invasion of Panama. Since then, Mr. Haviv has traveled from conflict to conflict zone, producing photographs of some of the late-twentieth century’s most difficult periods of violence.
“[People] want to give back, they want to help out, and the mistake is in presuming that the most effective and transparent way of helping is to do the work ourselves—to get on a plane to see and participate in it being done.”
“…after you’ve been away for 25 or 30 years, the likelihood of your having a family is pretty slim. A lot of people’s parents die while they’re in prison. Women don’t have the same support network as men do in prison which I think people find surprising.”
“The last four or five years I was in the Senate, there was simply no Democrat more conservative than any Republican and no Republican more liberal than any Democrat. And that’s just wrong. It’s unnatural.”
“True patriotism is the guy, man or woman, who shows up at the post office every day to be a postal clerk… I dislike and disapprove of those people who wrap themselves in the flag claiming to be patriots when they’ve…done nothing to help move this country forward.”
“There are more wedge issues that divert our attention from the real issues. That’s what I found during my time in the Senate…But the Republicans wanted to send their Republican candidates out to campaign about gay marriage and abortion and flag burning. It’s all about control of the Senate.”
“Rather than going for the stories that are most easily obtained, which are also often the ones people want to leak, you ask yourself what is going to be permanent.”
“It was critically important to me then, and it’s still critically important to me now that I do not take advantage of the subject of any photograph…for my benefits or for my agenda. We saw some really tough things, and it could have become gratuitous.”
“The negative ads we’ve kind of moved into, starting in the nineties, have gotten worse and worse. You never see businesses do attack ads, right? If Coke did an attack ad against Pepsi, Pepsi would have to attack Coke…. You could suppress down an entire product category.”
“When you think about what we have here—FedEx, UPS, Red Cross, Salvation Army, Walmart, Costco, Sam’s Club—you’ve got all these places that have networks that can be used to do distribution…I truly see the private sector as part of the first responder network.”
“To tell you the truth, I am drawn to these dangerous events even though they scare the hell out of me. I am sure a shrink would have a field day with that…I guess there is an adrenaline rush in trying to capture images under dangerous situations and making it out alive.”
“People working at the local level are indeed the people who understand how to make the federal government more responsive…”
“But instead, universities have been captured by a destructive ideology of victimhood that insists that to be a female or a minority on an American college campus is to be the target of endless, nonstop oppression.”
“Let’s say somebody is solidly in favor of abortion rights. She feels very strongly. Okay? But how can she learn to persuade anyone on the issue if she never even hears the other side of the argument?”
“You cited the race between Romney and Obama and that the Independents seemed to choose one or the other. My question for the political scientists would be: ‘Who was the Independent in that race?’”
“The Bush period and the approaches we took then, in many respects, are directly related to an era of American politics that came and went.”
“People behave themselves for one of two reasons: love of God, or fear of punishment. There’s not much that politicians can do about the former, but the latter is in our wheelhouse.”
“I really don’t see the Republican Party standing for a real free market or getting the government out of our lives on the domestic front. I don’t see them…proposing winding down the welfare state.”
“My point was always, ‘Look, this is the hook.’ Piracy is the hook, if you want to get people interested in Somalia’s problems and the region’s problems; you’re not going to get them to read a World Food Programme treatise.”
“It is my conviction that we are going through the greatest technological and economic shift in human history, and our political class is completely asleep at the switch.”
A woman, who had a Pennsylvania carry permit, gets arrested in New Jersey, not knowing that they don’t issue carry permits—and certainly not to out-of-state residents.
“I think it’s awful. It’s shocking what people are willing to accept just because everyone else in their community goes along.”
“I changed my major from theater to film because, in many of my auditions, I was typecast as a drug dealer or a murderer, and that changed my perception of what people thought a black man was.”
“I’m a Vietnam era veteran myself. The stigma of suicide today is only a fraction of what it was back then…Times are changing, and we are trying to meet those changes to get people taken care of in a timely way.”
One pundit said that “data died” after the 2016 presidential election. Gallup’s editor-in-chief doesn’t think so.
“I want to tickle a certain part of your brain, a thinking person’s part of your brain. We don’t really like giving answers on our podcasts. I ask questions.”
“By and large, as people mature and learn about how the real world works, they tend to become more pro-liberty. I know a lot more former socialists than I know former libertarians.”
In a one-on-one interview with Merion West, Georgia Congressman Jody Hice explains how his background as a Christian pastor informs his worldview, his bill to address the taxpayer burden of former presidents’ pensions, and a possible solution to easing division in a polarized America.
“Normally you have separation of powers, and you have supervision, but with special prosecutors you don’t have very much supervision. That’s the great danger.”
In an attempt to fix the stigma, my field started overpathologizing normality in an unconscious attempt to make everybody feel more empathy towards people who are mentally ill.
On how Americans talk about their political opponents: “I am delighted by our continued polarization and the fact that each side is unable to communicate with the other.”
On the current trend towards drug liberalization: “Everybody I know who functions at a high level in society is fairly reliable and trustworthy. My husband is an oncologist, and I can tell you that hardworking cancer doctors don’t spend their free time getting high.”
“These players are heroes to many young black boys. Sadly, now they see their heroes disrespecting the flag and our country. It’s a terrible message to send.”
Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report discusses the left’s opposition to free speech, polarization, third party candidates, and finding common ground in an interview with Merion West.
“I know that you can’t completely run government like a company, but you can bring in business principles and processes.”
“I don’t spend my weekends at $1,000 cocktail parties with powerful people. I spend my weekends with my family going shooting on our farm and doing things that everyday, ordinary Americans do.”
“This field is still considered by most to be something that is not really science, something that is not really possible, and we really have to change that.”
“It’s been proven that the more centrists there are in Congress, the more bills get passed and are enacted into law.”
“I think you have to separate conservatism from reactions to the Left. I don’t think they’re quite the same thing. Conservatism is starting to get more popular because of reaction to the Left.”
