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Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.
Zephyr Teachout
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Zephyr Teachout
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: October 24
Journalist
Law Professor
Politician
Seattle
Washington
Zephyr Rain Teachout
Zephyr R. Teachout
First
Voters
Giving
Favors
Needs
Tend
People
Wrong
Power
Give
Oftentimes
Firsts
Educate
Need
Favor
More quotes by Zephyr Teachout
There are some libertarians who are really anarchists, but others are more concerned about the distant relationship between themselves and power. They mistakenly think they want to get rid of government when instead they might just want to have greater access to power.
Zephyr Teachout
Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.
Zephyr Teachout
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
There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.
Zephyr Teachout
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
What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.
Zephyr Teachout
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
People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.
Zephyr Teachout
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
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
I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.
Zephyr Teachout
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
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
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
You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.
Zephyr Teachout
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
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
There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.
Zephyr Teachout
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
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