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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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Zephyr Teachout
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: October 24
Journalist
Law Professor
Politician
Seattle
Washington
Zephyr Rain Teachout
Zephyr R. Teachout
Stand
Winning
Idea
Opposed
Running
Focused
Become
Motivation
Ideas
Plans
Mind
Becomes
Particular

More quotes by 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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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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There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.
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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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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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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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
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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
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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.
Zephyr Teachout
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My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.
Zephyr Teachout
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What happens in New York affects national policy in very significant ways.
Zephyr Teachout
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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
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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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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
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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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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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I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.
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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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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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