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The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

Andrew Sullivan

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Andrew Sullivan
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: August 10
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Andrew Michael Sullivan
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More quotes by Andrew Sullivan

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When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.
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Don't fool yourself that you're blogging when you're really just putting stuff up online.
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When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.
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How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?
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You just have to keep going. I mean I think our job, my job, is to keep articulating that I exist and that there are lots of people like me exist and we just have no home.
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Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness.
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I think essentially corrupting institutions in Washington are turning conservatism into something that is really very creepy, but also emotionally and psychically powerful for people.
Andrew Sullivan
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The relationship of black Americans to Obama is sociologically riveting.
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...the current Human Rights Commission's working group is made up of the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. No, I'm not making that up.
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Bush has legitimized a huge expansion of the welfare state, liberalizing immigration, and using force for democratization abroad. All the next Democratic president has to do to finish Bush's hard work is to raise taxes to pay for it all.
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Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views raises the specter of domestic repression. But in a country with a First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly overrepresented.
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I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.
Andrew Sullivan
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It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.
Andrew Sullivan
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I think very few people are gay. I'm a two-percenter myself.
Andrew Sullivan
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For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships - certainly far more so than romantic love. Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person.
Andrew Sullivan
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I'm gay. I always have been and I always will be, and I'm happy.
Andrew Sullivan
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In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.
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Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.
Andrew Sullivan
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Homosexuality is like the weather. It just is.
Andrew Sullivan
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I think there were two great gay Americans obviously, and that was Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.
Andrew Sullivan