RPRick Perlstein

50 collected words

Rick Perlstein

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

Rick Perlstein / quote

02Undated

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

Rick Perlstein / quote

03Undated

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

Rick Perlstein / quote

04Undated

Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.

Rick Perlstein / quote

05Undated

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.

Rick Perlstein / quote

06Undated

Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.

Rick Perlstein / quote

07Undated

Chits knew no ideology.

Rick Perlstein / quote

08Undated

Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.

Rick Perlstein / quote

09Undated

Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.

Rick Perlstein / quote

10Undated

He fetishized limits.

Rick Perlstein / quote

11Undated

The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.

Rick Perlstein / quote

12Undated

One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew

Rick Perlstein / quote

13Undated

The head of Goldwater's California operation "what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: "Taken your vacation yet?" he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.

Rick Perlstein / quote

14Undated

Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.

Rick Perlstein / quote

15Undated

There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.

Rick Perlstein / quote

16Undated

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

Rick Perlstein / quote

17Undated

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 / quote

18Undated

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).

Rick Perlstein / quote

19Undated

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 / quote

20Undated

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 / quote

21Undated

Reagan's emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people's longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.

Rick Perlstein / quote

22Undated

Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.

Rick Perlstein / quote

23Undated

Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that?

Rick Perlstein / quote

24Undated

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

Rick Perlstein / quote