Charlie Pierce Quotes

We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.

In order to get big things done, sometimes, presidents have to be deft at moving the pea around under the shells.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

There is a reason why conservatives talk about 'government' and not 'self-government,' because to refer to the latter is to concede that 'the government' is really the most basic product of our political commonwealth, that it is what we produce among ourselves so as to order the production of everything else that we do together.

We have a revolutionary history to honor and uphold. Which was what Nelson Mandela did. He reminded us of that which we need to be reminded, over and over again, about our own best selves.

If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels.

There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

Campaigns are no longer high-minded exchanges of ideas, even though God knows we need more good ones - ideas, that is.

It's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.

Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.

There is a lot in American politics (and in American life) that is angry, greedy, reckless and violent.

We, The People is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other.

The perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4:00 A.M.

I think, over the last couple of years, the written word has made a comeback on the Internet. For example, I'm seeing more long-form narrative experiments there. The overall noise level, however, continues to increase. Do we really need TV screens to watch when we pump gas? Really?

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

Every president learns on the job because nobody`s really prepared for the kind of decisions that cross your desk every day. No one`s prepared for that. No vice president who has scended to the presidency has ever truly been ready for that. Certainly, no vice president who`s assumed the presidency in extremis, like Harry Truman, has been ready for that. But this Trump guy doesn`t seem to be ready for a career in government.

The man is the Piltdown Man of modern politics.

As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.

One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimers - and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you - is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so.

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.

You know, what genuinely makes me uneasy with the way things are going are not - is not really that Trump is going to do everything he said he was going to do, it`s that he has no idea of his job as president. Plus, the people who have been up close and realized that he has no idea how to do this job are leaking like sieves.

Bill Clinton was not a symbol. People did not invest in him their idea of what America should be or, worse, their pride in what they thought America had become. There was no great moral self-congratulation in having elected a president from Arkansas.

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.

The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank's marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id.

The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.

According to the people who dearly would love to throw him out of office, Barack Obama was elected to be 'above politics.' He wasn't elected to be president, after all. He was elected as an avatar of American tolerance. His attempts to get himself reelected imply a certain, well, ingratitude.

If you ever become a mother, can I have one of the puppies?