Andrew Sullivan famous quotes

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#World #Mount Rushmore #Als

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Sports #Writing #Alive

Homosexuality is like the weather. It just is.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Gay #Weather #Homosexuality

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Political #Ideology #Political Ideology

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Country #War #May

Some of this is unavailable to the male-female union: there is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman; and again, the lack of children gives gay couples greater freedom. Their failures entail fewer consequences for others. But something of the gay's relationship's necessary honesty, its flexibility, and its equality could undoubtedly help strengthen and inform many heterosexual bonds.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Children #Honesty #Couple

For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships - certainly far more so than romantic love. Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Distance #Romantic Love #Space

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Minorities #Tiny #Vote

The Dixiecrats meet again in New York. Now they're called Republicans.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#New York #Republican

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Sex #Gay #Example

If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated by strangers.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Couple #Gay #Law

I enjoy being around people who disagree with me; and I enjoy being in non-political contexts and activities.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#People #Political #Enjoy

I was also reminded of one of the unique charms of NYC in the summer: vast piles of rotting garbage piled on the sidewalks, with that sweet yet nauseating smell of decomposing groceries sitting in the humid fetid air, and rancid food juices oozing over the sticky sidewalks. With my windows open to counter the stuffiness, I could occasionally catch a whiff of the stench outside. People actually like living in this chaotic, fetid monument to incompetence? Beats me.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Summer #Sweet #Unique

Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Honesty #Gay #Life Is

Although I never publicly defended promiscuity, I never publicly attacked it. I attempted to avoid the subject, in part because I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Feels #Stills #Subjects

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Pain #Believe #Struggle

The essence of romantic love is not the company of a lover but the pursuit.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Love You #Romantic Love #Love Is

In many ways, my attachment to human freedom was completely compatible with my right to live freely as a homosexual.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Attachment #Way #Live Free

Homophobia: the fear that another man will treat you like you treat women.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Men #Like You #Homosexuality

I must say that the Katrina response does help me better understand the situation in Iraq, ... The best bet is that the president doesn't actually know what's happening there, is cocooned from reality, has no one in his high-level staff able to tell him what's actually happening, and has created a culture of denial and loyalty that makes fixing mistakes or holding people accountable all but impossible.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Loyalty #Mistake #Reality

The most successful marriages, gay or straight, even if they begin in romantic love, often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Gay #Successful #Romantic Love

Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Fashion #Responsibility #Animal

Bush has legitimized a huge expansion of the welfare state, liberalizing immigration, and using force for democratization abroad. All the next Democratic president has to do to finish Bush's hard work is to raise taxes to pay for it all.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Hard Work #President #Expansion

Here’s why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Cheer #Crowds #Want

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Years #Yesterday #Remember

The relationship of black Americans to Obama is sociologically riveting.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Black

It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#War #President #Technique

I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Writing #Thinking #Years

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Iraq #Space #Middle East

Al Gore's problem, in my view, is that he never liked politics. He's actually deeply uncomfortable in it but felt he had to do it because of his father. He's much more comfortable in a private sector role and has, in fact, been much more successful in a private sector role, and I admire him for that.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Father #Successful #Views

Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#War #Mean #Giving

The good news about me is that my friends and social network is entirely independent of politics.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Independent #News #Social Network

There is something about hearing your president affirm your humanity that you don't know what effect it has until you hear it.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Humanity #President #Hearing

When I first started talking about gay marriage, most people in the gay community looked at me as if I was insane or possibly a fascist reactionary.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Gay #Talking #People

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Religious #Order #Political

When I was about eight, I asked my mother if it was true that God knows everything about you. When she answered yes, I said, 'Then there's no hope for me, Mum.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Mother #Eight #Said

I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Insecure #Thinking #People

What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Religious #Democracy #Maintenance

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Errors

Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession... are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques, is true?
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Historical #Enemy #Gains

If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Order #Light #People

When Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Abu Ghraib

When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Christian #Long #Christianity

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Dark #Fate #Office

No American should be forced to choose between their spouse and their country.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Country #Should #Spouse

I purge compulsively. I'm constantly shedding things.
-- Andrew Sullivan

[Senator] Kerry [democrat MA] is emerging as the worst of all the viable Democratic candidates. He has the backbone of Clinton and the charm of Gore.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Politics #Clinton #Charm

...when a reporter is quoting Sid Blumenthal on president Bush, you know he's scraping the barrel.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#President #Politics #Sids

[Bush Hating] undermines the good faith necessary for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al Franken are all about.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Hate #People #Politics

Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views raises the specter of domestic repression. But in a country with a First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly overrepresented.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Country #Government #Views

All s, like all human beings, get many things wrong. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary achievement as of the U.S. was to succeed in getting the two biggest challenges of his time right: defeating the Soviet Union and reviving the American economy and spirit. Neither of those achievements was inevitable. Both were fiercely opposed at the time. But he persisted; his visionary focus matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#War #Character #Two

We've got fuel prices coming down and good travel numbers coming out, so it's not surprising airline stocks are going up.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Numbers #Fuel #Down And

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Dirty #Secret #Needs

A mind is a wonderful thing to change.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Mind #Wonderful

I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold,
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Feels #Stills

[T]he myth that there was somehow a magic wand in the early 1980s to cure AIDS - a wand that Reagan deliberately refused to wave - is now almost conventional wisdom.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Magic #Politics #Wave

[D]id you really expect fairness on the environmental issue? For a swathe of reporters, this is not a matter of empirical reporting; it's a matter of faith. Bush cannot be pro-environment because he's Bush.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Issues #Environmental #Politics

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Pain #Gay #Desire

I watched Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle. Good grief. What whining weenies.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Grief #Politics #Whining

...the current Human Rights Commission's working group is made up of the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. No, I'm not making that up.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Zimbabwe #Rights #Saudi Arabia

Personally, I'd rather have pins stuck in my eyes than endure a conversation with John Kerry, but I'd love to hang with Bush.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Eye #Politics #Conversation

There is no escaping this fight. It is civilization or Jihadism. We can and should debate tactics; but the sides are clear enough.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Fighting #Civilization #Escaping

It's only because you can now watch cheerfully biased Fox News that you begin to realize how cheerlessly biased CNN really is - and always was. Or CBS. Or ABC. Or the BBC.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Cnn #Watches #News

In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Talking #Skills #Academia

Michael Moore: a man who never without an excuse for keeping murdering tyrants in power. But now he's supporting the man who bombed Milosevic into submission? How about an explanation, Mr Moore?
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Men #Tyrants #Politics

The one man more responsible for destroying the Democratic centrist revival, for throwing away the Clinton legacy, and for suicidally pitching his party to the populist left was Al Gore
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Party #Men #Als

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Religious #Lying #Law