Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.
Zephyr Teachout
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Zephyr Teachout
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: October 24
Journalist
Law Professor
Politician
Seattle
Washington
Zephyr Rain Teachout
Zephyr R. Teachout
Think
Professors
Thinking
Arts
Poetry
Politics
Law
Art
Need
Needs
Professor
More quotes by Zephyr Teachout
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
I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.
Zephyr Teachout
I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.
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
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
I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.
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
People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.
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
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
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 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
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