Steve Inskeep Quotes

In this country tonight, PBS shows one of the most talked about tributes of the year.

I would say that the one incredible thing that Karachi has going for it is the unabated supply of new migrants that pour into it day after day. It could be a poor factory worker who simply wants a job, it could be an ambitious guy coming for an education - they all add hope and vibrancy to the city. Now, this is not something that is generally taken as positive in Karachi. But the hope is that the migration that comes into the city replenishes its stores of resilience and energy.

I do know that a law professor there [in Columbia University] published an article calling me a white supremacist.

The number of CEOs voluntarily leaving their jobs or being forced out spiked early. Many of those companies will be turning to an interim CEO to take the reins. These temporary leaders are increasingly in demand, according to those who watch corner office trends.

You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, "My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened." And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked.

When I go to American cities and speak to American audiences about Karachi, I am able to draw their own wonder and consternation about the cities they live in as an entry point to this other faraway, instant city.

President-elect [Donald] Trump has made a provocative choice for secretary of education. Betsy DeVos comes from a wealthy Michigan family. She is an advocate for school choice. That phrase means, in essence, directing public education money to charter schools, private schools or parochial schools.

I've just been flooded with emails of people just giving testimonies of their lives, saying exactly this. I got an email from a guy who works for some sort of defense contractor, some lower-level job, served in the military. And he said, look, I served in the military with black and Latino soldiers. My supervisor is a young black woman who's smart as a whip, and I admire her, and we get along great.

[Democrats] have lost the capacity to speak to the vast middle of America, an America that is, in large part, white, very religious and not highly educated.

Bloomberg says in this poll, leaders from across the political spectrum have condemned this policy, saying banning members of an entire religion from entering the country goes against everything we believe in as Americans, and it will make our country less safe by alienated the allies we need to fight ISIS.

Toward the end of the campaign, we interviewed some voters in Raleigh, N.C., which is a generally Democratic city, and I'm thinking of a young couple. They had two kids. They described themselves as Christian. They oppose gay marriage. And they were saying that even though they didn't like Donald Trump, they were thinking of voting for him. And one of the reasons was they felt that they were - their very views were making them socially unacceptable. They were feeling a little alienated from the world.

Here is a needle President Obama needs to thread if he chooses a ninth. The nominee would need to be so strongly qualified that he or she would be hard to reject. The person must also be willing to be nominated even though leading Senate Republicans have said they will not consider anyone the president names.

[Identity liberalism] is about recognition and self-definition. It's narcissistic. It's isolating. It looks within. And it also makes two contradictory claims on people.

People don't know where they stand and what they're going to lose, and that makes things uncertain. The political parties try to meld people together, but then that becomes a problem. There are parallels here, to American cities, which, in the '80s, with massive rural to urban migration, saw incredible amounts of violence.

Putin himself is a bit of a risk taker, so the invading Ukraine, in the east in particular - Crimea was risky.

[Identity liberalism] says, on the one hand, you can never understand me because you are not exactly the kind of person I've defined myself to be. And on the other hand, you must recognize me and feel for me. Well, if you're so different that I'm not able to get into your head and I'm not able to experience or sympathize with what you experience, why should I care?

As we have seen after every other [Donald] Trump controversy, this one only increased their enthusiasm for him. His supporters thought the idea of a temporary halt in Muslims coming to the U.S. was a common sense proposal in a time of great fear about terrorism.

We have to remember in that Bloomberg poll, strong Republican support for [Donald ]Trump's proposal, but the country at large - strong opposition to that support.

The Republican presidential candidate [Donald Trump] provoked condemnation from leaders in both parties and around the world. He did that by proposing to bar all Muslims from entering the United States.

The Republican critique here is that Russia is in a weak situation, but has been emboldened by a weak response from the United States, that in Ukraine, that in other places, the United States has not stepped forward.

Republicans are now trying to stop Donald Trump. And there was much more ferocious and widespread criticism from Republicans of Trump this time around.

We need to be stronger. We need to deter the Russians. We need to show resolve, which is why cooperating with them on the other hand can be more difficult.

Ever since [Ronald] Reagan, they've been able to capture the message and an understanding - or persuade people of a certain understanding of what the nation is about and what's good for it.

Those are the liberals who don't want to win. Those are the liberals who are in love with noble defeats, and I'm sick and tired of noble defeats.

Younger people - not just older people - holding this basic underlying attitude that's suggested there that women aren't worth much, that they're property, that just about anything can be done with them.

The New York Times reports that [Donald] Trump wants [Jared] Kushner in the White House, and he's exploring whether he can take a position. It's problematic, though, because even an unpaid job could fall under a law prohibiting nepotism.

Let me name three of the people who influenced me, although it's definitely not a complete list. Ayesha Jalal, the formidable Pakistani-American historian, has rigorously re-evaluated Jinnah's political strategies leading up to Partition. Akbar Ahmed, a former diplomat and now a distinguished scholar, has documented Jinnah's life as a man who welcomed, worked with, and even married people of other faiths. And then there is Ardeshir Cowasjee, the great Parsi newspaper columnist, who in his mid-80s is a kind of living history of all of Pakistan, old enough to have known Jinnah himself.

People who want a different Pakistan have to find a way to go back into their own past and revive the vision of their founders, that was clearly a tolerant and diverse one, so that they can distinguish it from the one that has been imposed upon it. If they can do that, they can take back this city and their country.

Hillary Clinton, [Democrats] say, leads the popular vote by two million, and a shift of a few votes in a few states would have won the election.

I see parallels between Karachi and the cities that I was familiar with: a very different place, but in terms of its human stories not really very different at all. That was what excited me about the place - that it was so complex, as difficult to me as an outsider and yet so human in a way that was ultimately very familiar.

Karachi has had an overdose of history, too much has happened.

We have 24 states where Republicans run both of them. But in terms of a liberal project that people feel they can sign on to, that feels that it speaks to everyone in the country, that speaks to what we share and the principles we hold, Republicans have developed a message for all of that, you know?

The fact that - I mean, these are things to be talked about. You can't do anything without educating the public, right? And that's a slow work.

We've learned something about President-elect [Donald] Trump's choice for secretary of defense. Lawmakers in Congress intend to proper debate over whether retired General James Mattis meets a requirement for civilian control of the military.

Democrats have simply lost the country.

People are supposed to be loyal to the country above [Donald's Trump] family.

Is that really the issue [of bathrooms and gender] we want to be pushing leading up to a momentous election like this one? It's that shortsightedness that comes from identity politics.

Congress can grant a waiver [for General James Mattis ] and has done that once in history.

To take one example, I mean, the whole issue of bathrooms and gender - in this particular election, when the stakes were so high, the fact that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital on this issue that frightened people. People were misinformed about certain things, but it was really a question of where young people would be going to the bathroom and where they would be in lockers.

I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics - I'm almost quoting him - he said, we don't talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country. That is America, and you can reach those people.

India may be overtaking China as the world's most polluted country. Even now, which country is worse depends on the day.

I'm just imagining some of [Mark Lilla] fellow liberals being rather angry at you saying such a thing [that Democrats and liberals, more generally, lost a lot of political capital ].

President-elect Trump has said he would like to improve relations with Russia. His choice for defense secretary views Russia as America's number one threat.

The president who did the most for black Americans in 20th century history was Lyndon Johnson, and he got his hands dirty by dealing with Southern senators, Southern congressmen, horse trading with them, cajoling them, learning what not to talk about. And he got civil rights passed and Great Society programs. That should be the model. Get over yourself.

When the Defense Department was established after World War II, a law said that any defense secretary with military experience must have been out of the military at least seven years. General [James] Mattis doesn't meet that.

I prefer a dirty victory to a noble defeat.

We have 31 Republican governors in this country. We have roughly the same number of Republican legislatures.

Researchers have been asking a basic question of young people. Should men be allowed to beat their wives? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. U.N. researchers put that question to adolescent girls in India and Pakistan and 53 percent - a majority of girls - said yes, wife beating is justifiable even if it's for refusing sex.