politics
On what planet do you spend most of your time?…Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.
Town hall meeting, Dartmouth, NH, August 18, 2009
The stupidity and blindness of American power, which, in its own terms is perfectly “logical”—and yet its terms are fantastically arbitrary and respond only to the “reality” of a thinking that goes on within an artificial and closed system. To defend your own reality and then impose it forcefully on the outside world is paranoia.
October 25, 1967 journal entry in The Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 5.
Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are two things people at the top can’t stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.
Hocus Pocus (New York: Putnam, 1997), 201–2
And they saw hope pass by in a train.
Description of mourners lined up along the railroad tracks, as the train carrying RFK traveled from New York City to Washington, in “April 23, 1969: R.F.K. Assassin Sirhan Sirhan Sentenced to Death,” April 23, 2012.
When our leaders take these anti-science positions, or when they happily plead ignorance about some of the most important issues of our time—our energy use, global warming, genomics, all the revolutions unleashed by computer science—they’re not just being anti-intellectual. They’re also being un-American. The people who founded this country were serious science geeks. We should be celebrating this fact, not running away from it.
“A Live Discussion on Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America,” Huffington Post, March 19, 2009.
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
“Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,”The New York Times, August 14, 2011.
This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as we do when the baby gets hold of a hammer. It’s just a question of how much damage he can do with it before you can take it away from him. Well, in eighteen months these babies have left a record of devastation.
“Congress Session, Rogers Says, Is Like Baby Getting a Hammer,” Letter to the Editor, The New York Times, July 5, 1930.
What a week. As some of you heard, the state of Hawaii released my official long-form birth certificate. Hopefully this puts all doubts to rest. But just in case there are any lingering questions, tonight I’m prepared to go a step further. Tonight, for the first time, I am releasing my official birth video.
The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, April 30, 2011.
If this party has a message, it has done a hell of a job of hiding it tonight.
CNN, August 25, 2008
You realize that one reason nothing gets done in America is that one of the political parties puts so much more into fantasy problems than real ones. Governing this country with Republicans is like rooming with a meth addict. You want to address real-life problems like when the rent is due, and they’re saying, “How can you even think of that stuff when there’s police scanner voices coming out of the air conditioning unit?”
Real Time With Bill Maher, HBO, Episode 206, March 18, 2011.
In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should “have his head examined,” as General MacArthur so delicately put it.
Speech delivered to cadets at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, February 25, 2011.
Bad metaphors make for bad policy.
“Block Those Metaphors,” The New York Times, December 12, 2010.