Zephyr Teachout Quotes

People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.

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?"

Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.

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.

There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.

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.

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.

My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.

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.

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.

What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.

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.

What happens in New York affects national policy in very significant ways.

I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.

I tend to be a kind of left federalist. There's a value to more power of certain kinds being positioned at a more local level.

I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

It's a lot harder to push forward things, like energy policy. There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power.

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.

You can't just provide power, you also need public education.

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.

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.

Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.

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.

I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.

This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth.

I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.

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.

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.