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" Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions. "
Rick Perlstein
Place
Predictions
Hell
Related Quotes:
" I'm a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event - and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am. "
Rick Perlstein
Event
More
Me
" In Ronald Reagan's case, he always bore with him this extraordinary ability to radiate confidence, optimism, clarity, a blitheness of spirit, in what other people saw as chaos. And after the 1970s, that was catnip. "
Rick Perlstein
Chaos
People
Optimism
" Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed. "
Rick Perlstein
Blessed
Children
Our
" Why was Barack Obama attractive to people in 2008? If you think about Barack Obama, there's all this anxiety about society, just kind of wracked by centripetal forces - the idea that the center's not holding, no one can talk to each other, the idea of a political system that's broken. "
Rick Perlstein
Anxiety
Society
Think
" I believe politics is a team sport. That, for awful and unfortunate reasons beyond any of our control, the American system only allows, effectively, for two teams. "
Rick Perlstein
Team
Control
Two
" The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs. "
Rick Perlstein
Education
History
World
" It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. "
Rick Perlstein
American
Remember
Culture
" 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. "
Rick Perlstein
Good
Intelligence
Think
" Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he broke Alger Hiss in 1948 (he never shifted course, and lost his soul). "
Rick Perlstein
Media
Conspiracy
Lost
" Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as 'the Negro President'). "
Rick Perlstein
Government
Army
Enemy
" There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days. "
Rick Perlstein
Failure
Days
Thousand
" As an adult, I've always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents' circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal. "
Rick Perlstein
Own
Myself
Angry
" Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory. "
Rick Perlstein
Computers
Functions
Memory
" Bill de Blasio was swept to the New York mayoralty on the promise of getting Gracie Mansion out from under the thumb of corporate elites. "
Rick Perlstein
New York
New
Out
" Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct. "
Rick Perlstein
Detail
Historical
Follow
" I love trade magazines - any trade's magazine: by entering into what is taken for granted in a world not your own, you better recognize the vastness of the social universe - for there are so, so many worlds that are not your own. "
Rick Perlstein
Love
You
World
" I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature. "
Rick Perlstein
Nature
Career
Rather
" Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it). "
Rick Perlstein
Home
Christmas
Lost
" 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. "
Rick Perlstein
American
Intelligence
People
" We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. "
Rick Perlstein
Love
Political
Way
" It's almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around middle-class fears, Democrats win the election; when Republicans are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around cultural fears, Republicans win the election. "
Rick Perlstein
Democrats
Election
Frame
" I can't summarize my favorite movie, Jacques Tati's 'Play Time.' You just have to see it. "
Rick Perlstein
You
Play
See
" Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver's license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee's Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was finally able to close down in 2011 for safety reasons. It was my teenage paradise. "
Rick Perlstein
Time
School
Safety
" When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public. "
Rick Perlstein
Determination
Policy
Ignore
" 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. "
Rick Perlstein
Trend
Buddies
Chicago
" There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum. "
Rick Perlstein
Think
See
Rage
" The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the 'American War' upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone's 'JFK.' "
Rick Perlstein
Argument
War
Stone
" Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious? "
Rick Perlstein
Social
Without
Social Justice
" Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip. "
Rick Perlstein
Some
Social
Side
" I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop. "
Rick Perlstein
Bolshevik
Just
Laptop