Rick Perlstein Zitate – Sprüche auf Englisch mit Übersetzung

Zitat des Tages von Rick Perlstein:

I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should - not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace.

I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it.

Rick Perlstein

There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.

Rick Perlstein

The fact is that the Democratic Party in modern times has always had a conservative wing, one frequently as strong or stronger than its liberal wing, and as such, when progressives speak of the party as a vehicle that naturally belongs to them, as if by right - until conservatives stole it from them - they weaken progressivism.

Rick Perlstein

Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.

Rick Perlstein

Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long - because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.

Rick Perlstein

In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.

Rick Perlstein

I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should - not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace.

Rick Perlstein

Polling only works in a country without a depressed, frightened populace. Where the public trusts authorities enough to tell them the truth without fear of retribution.

Rick Perlstein

Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count. Seventy-six percent of them turned out in November 2012, when Missouri was a key swing state for Barack Obama's reelection.

Rick Perlstein

I love trade magazines - any trade's magazine: by entering into what is taken for granted in a world not your own, you better recognize the vastness of the social universe - for there are so, so many worlds that are not your own.

Rick Perlstein

Look at liberty's greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation. Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms - often putting their lives on the line - called themselves liberals.

Rick Perlstein

Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as 'the Negro President').

Rick Perlstein

Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.

Rick Perlstein

Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver's license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee's Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was finally able to close down in 2011 for safety reasons. It was my teenage paradise.

Rick Perlstein

There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum.

Rick Perlstein

When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.

Rick Perlstein

For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures - means - is the core of what being 'principled' means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome - ends - even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being 'principled' means.

Rick Perlstein

It's almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around middle-class fears, Democrats win the election; when Republicans are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around cultural fears, Republicans win the election.

Rick Perlstein

I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop.

Rick Perlstein

Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all.

Rick Perlstein

I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am.

Rick Perlstein

Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.'

Rick Perlstein

For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.

Rick Perlstein

Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).

Rick Perlstein

When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.

Rick Perlstein

Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer.

Rick Perlstein

The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs.

Rick Perlstein

As an adult, I've always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents' circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal.

Rick Perlstein

Sometimes I like to think that the responsibility of every new generation of Democrats is to devise a program that mints new Democrats for another seventy-five years or so.

Rick Perlstein

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

Rick Perlstein

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake.

Rick Perlstein

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

Rick Perlstein

Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.

Rick Perlstein

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

Rick Perlstein

It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.

Rick Perlstein

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.

Rick Perlstein