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Andrew Sullivan Quotes
born 1963 England
Andrew Michael Sullivan (born 10 August 1963) is a libertarian conservative author and political commentator. He is a former editor of The New Republic and the Daily Beast, author of three books and a pioneer in the field of blog journalism.
England Activists Bloggers Columnists Conservatives Also known as: Sullivan, Andrew
Random Andrew Sullivan quote
19 quotes
A constitutional republic dedicated before everything to the protection of liberty cannot legalize torture and remain a constitutional republic. It imports into itself a tumor of pure tyranny.
In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.
If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?
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.
First silence. Then denial. Then support of the insupportable. Then vilification of the dissenters. The pattern is as old as time.
What al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein did was an extreme form of sadistic torture, the kind that psychopaths enjoy and inflict.
Torture was necessary to maintain slavery. It was integral to slavery. You cannot have slavery without some torture or the threat of torture; and you cannot have torture without slavery.
When Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.
In the Cold War, I was pro-American. The world needed a counter-weight to the evils of expansionist, imperial communism.
Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back.
The Reactionary Temptation (2017)
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.
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.
We are living in an era of populism and demagoguery. And yes, there’s racism and xenophobia mixed into it.
The Reactionary Temptation (2017)
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.
You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.
The Reactionary Temptation (2017)
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?
The conservatism I grew up around was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility, and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.
The Conservative Soul (2006)
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.
Again, it reduces someone's moral responsibility and intellectual autonomy to a racial stereotype — that all blacks are innocent victims who cannot be held responsible for their beliefs or arguments; or that all blacks are so oppressed that any bigotry they utter is permissible.
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