The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Rick Perlstein

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?

Brand, Me, People

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.

Business, Progress, American

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.

Soul, American, Speak

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.

Good, Fun, Feel Good

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.

Political, People, Better

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).

Education, Stress, College

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).

Home, Thought, Lost

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

Memory, Right-Wing

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

Question, Days, Laws

(President) Lyndon Johnson still snapped between exultation and insecurity.

emotion, identity

I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.

hate, northerners, southerners

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

culture, influence, simplification