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Democracy requires a certain relish for confusion

Molly Ivins

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Molly Ivins
Age: 62 †
Born: 1944
Born: August 30
Died: 2007
Died: January 31
Columnist
Journalist
Writer
Monterey
California
Orderly
Neat
Confusion
Requires
Democracy
Certain
Relish

More quotes by Molly Ivins

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Good thing we've still got politics in Texas - finest form of free entertainment ever invented.
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Behind a smoke screen of high-profile female appointees and soothing slogans, George W. Bush is waging war on women.
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Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left there's nothing you can do about being born liberal - fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed.
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Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided me the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life.
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I believe in practicing prudence at least once every two or three years.
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And the funny thing is, I've always been an optimist - it's practically a congenital disorder with me.
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Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?
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My friend Mercedes Pena made me get in touch with my emotions just before I had a breast cut off. Just as I suspected, they were awful. How do you Latinas do this all the time in touch with your emotions? I asked her. That's why we take siestas, she replied.
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The Founders were right all along, but the results are a lot funnier than they intended.
Molly Ivins
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It's like, duh. Just when you thought there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, the Republicans go and prove you're wrong.
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As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.
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The first rule of holes: When you're in one stop digging.
Molly Ivins
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I think provincialism is an endemic characteristic with mankind, I think everybody everywhere is provincial, but it is particularly striking with Texans, and we tend to be very Texcentric.
Molly Ivins
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Sometimes I think Texas exists as a reality check for those who might wander too far toward the precious.
Molly Ivins
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Listen to the people who are talking about how to fix what's wrong, not the ones who just work people into a snit over the problems. Listen to the people who have ideas about how to fix things, not the ones who just blame others.
Molly Ivins
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the more a body tries to explode all the foolish myths that have grown up about Texas by telling the truth, the more a body will wind up adding to the mythology.
Molly Ivins
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In city rooms and in the bars where newspeople drink, you can find out what's going on. You can't find it in the papers.
Molly Ivins
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We often seem to be swimming through such a miasma of sexual violence - in advertising, television programming, heavy metal, rap, films, and worst of all, in the home - that even First Amendment absolutists sometimes daydream about how nice it would be to have government-as-nanny just outlaw all this effluent.
Molly Ivins
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Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.
Molly Ivins
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What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.
Molly Ivins