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

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
Politics
Academics
Egotistical
Tendency
Tendencies
Dirty
Deeply
Among
Especially

More quotes by Zephyr Teachout

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I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.
Zephyr Teachout
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What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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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
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Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.
Zephyr Teachout
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People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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You can't just provide power, you also need public education.
Zephyr Teachout
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I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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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
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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