Historical Quotes
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The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God's name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel's 'miraculous' military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion's side.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
While Obama might not push college education exclusively, like most Democrats he does oversell it and does shortchange the alternatives. And millions of young Americans pay the price.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (That's me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free).
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
One thing Republicans understand: In American elections, you have to choose from among only two people - not between the perfect and the good.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
The reason inflation was brought down to manageable levels, by the time of Ronald Reagan's re-election, was directly attributable to Jimmy Carter's very courageous act, hiring a Federal Reserve chair, with the charge to induce a recession. That recession was probably the reason he didn't win a second term.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they'll say something like, 'Oh, didn't he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?' Well, that's just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Everyone on the Left has a favorite story that allows them to kind of excuse Reagan, explain away Reagan, say he was dumb, but unless we reckon with that kind of emotional intelligence and his ability to kind of speak to the aspirations of the American people, the less liberals are going to be able to understand the soul of his appeal.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Whatever you think about his intelligence, what's unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that's more fun, right? It's more fun to feel good than feel bad. That's part of our human state.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don't think through them, is fascinating to me.
Quote by -Rick Perlstein
My hope is that the corona crisis will help bring us into a new age of cooperation and solidarity and a realization that we're in this together.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
We'll all remember 2020 as an historic year. And for decades, people will be able to say, remember 2020. Remember when things were really tough. Who did we rely on? I think that could impact a whole generation.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
A universal basic income would be the best way to give everyone the opportunity to do more unpaid but incredibly important work, such as caring for children and the elderly.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
A worldwide shift to a shorter working week could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half. Countries with a shorter working week have a smaller ecological footprint.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
If we assume the best in people, we can radically redesign our democracy and welfare states.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
The first thing we should acknowledge is that poverty is hugely expensive. It varies from country to country, but most of the time it's around 3, 4 or 5% of GDP. If you look at what it would cost just to top up the income of all the poor people in a country, it would cost about 1% of GDP.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
What the underdog socialist has forgotten is that the story of the left ought to be a narrative of hope and progress.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
As a species of animal that evolved to make connections and work together, it feels strange to suppress our desire for contact. People enjoy touching each other, and find joy in seeing each other in person - but now we have to keep our physical distance.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
When I talk about 'everyday communism', I am teasing a little. It is a provocative idea. But then we all do a lot of sharing a lot of the time. We don't draw up contracts for everything.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender' equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
The real 'Lord of the Flies' is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
This is what a crisis does: It makes you question the status quo. That doesn't mean that after a crisis we move into some kind of utopia. But it is an opportunity for political change.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
Basic income would give people the most important freedom: the freedom of deciding for themselves what they want to do with their lives.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is: through work.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Kenya, policymakers all over the world have become interested in basic income as an answer to poverty, unemployment and the bureaucratic behemoth of the modern welfare state.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
I am part of a broad social movement. Ten years ago, it would have unimaginable for some random Dutch historian to go viral when talking about taxes. Yet here we are.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
I think one of the most important facts of basic income would be that it's not only a redistribution of income, but also of power. So the cleaners and bin men would have a lot more bargaining power.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
A world where wages no longer rise still needs consumers. Middle-class purchasing power has been maintained through loans, loans and more loans. The Calvinistic reflex that you have to work for your money has turned into a license for inequality.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
We so often tend to think our democracies are ruled by procedures and laws, but they are also governed by implicit rules and assumptions and one of them is the ability to feel shame - that you can be shamed.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
Only the work that generates money is allowed to count toward GDP. Little wonder, then, that we have organized education around feeding as many people as possible in bite-size flexible parcels into the employment establishment.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
Our streets are very important for social cohesion, for feelings of safety, and we just surrendered all this to the car. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
I first read 'Lord of the Flies' as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding's view of human nature.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
Instead of a universal basic income, we could have a basic income guarantee. Or, as economists prefer to call it, a negative income tax.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
We know from scientific studies that infants as young as six months old can distinguish right from wrong and have a preference for the good over the bad. I think it's important to design our education and our schools around that insight, to bring out the best in our kids.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
I've been thinking that school, or certainly the traditional English public school model, is like a prison, in that you can't get out and it is hierarchical. As a result they have a lot of bullying. On the other hand if you mix ages and academic ability this is less of a problem.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
Since the 70s and the 80s you see the rise of neoliberalism. The central dogma of neoliberalism was that most people are selfish. So, we started designing our institutions around that idea, our schools, our workplaces, our democracies. The government became less and less important.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
Literally every single sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone - internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition - was developed by researchers on the government payroll.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman
I think it's rational to assume the best in other people because most people are pretty decent.
Quote by -Rutger Bregman