Latest Zephyr Teachout Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Integrity is hard work. I do think the internet makes it harder because of the temptations of performance. You can perform and have integrity, but it's easier just to perform. So the temptations of social media lead to some dissonance.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Integrity, Hard Work, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Mistake, People, Democracy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Believe, People, Telling The Truth

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics. People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, "Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?".

  Zephyr Teachout

  Fun, Character, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Lying, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Believe, Wings, News

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth. Politicians might mention renewable energy, and the public will think, "That sounds good, but I don't believe they're going to do everything they can to build those towers."

  Zephyr Teachout

  Believe, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think a lot of the reason people are attracted to the Keystone pipeline is because at least we're doing something. There's a fear that society will collapse if it's not acting. To contrast those actions with other actions is important in making it feel plausible. Maybe we must have the size of the dream meet the size of the threat.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Dream, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It's a lot harder to push forward things, like energy policy. There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Dream, Wind, Energy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Country, New York, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• What happens in New York affects national policy in very significant ways.

  Zephyr Teachout

  New York, Way, Significant

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• A combination of working in politics as well as teaching and being [an actor] certainly helped. I became so much more comfortable in front of a crowd. I felt like I was calling on all those other experiences.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Teaching, Calling, Actors

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I don't have any particular plans in mind. What I see is that you can become so focused on the idea of running that winning becomes your motivation, as opposed to what you stand for being your motivation.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Running, Motivation, Winning

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.

  Zephyr Teachout

  People, Creative, Artistic

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Art, Thinking, Law

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think the reason you see so many people dropping out of politics is because there's an anti-poetic strain in modern political discourse.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Thinking, People, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Art, Thinking, Forums

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Writing, Creativity, Essentials

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Thinking, People, Creative

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Book, Writing, Easy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Dirty, Egotistical, Tendencies

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• History is a series of mistakes. Now the task is to plan for those mistakes so those of us who are populists can actually take over the reins of power when the right mistakes are made.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Mistake, Tasks, Made

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Dirty, Europe, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• New York City is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change, so I see Keystone as the central threat to New York.

  Zephyr Teachout

  New York, Cities, Climate

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• As a school board member, I might have particular views about the ways we might increase the economics curriculum in a local high school, but I'm not sure I should mandate that for the entire country.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Country, School, Views

  Source: www.guernicamag.com