Andrew Sullivan Quotes

[Senator] Kerry [democrat MA] is emerging as the worst of all the viable Democratic candidates. He has the backbone of Clinton and the charm of Gore.

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.

The New York Times had not become The New York Times overnight. It had to earn its reputation day-by-day.

I must say that the Katrina response does help me better understand the situation in Iraq, ... The best bet is that the president doesn't actually know what's happening there, is cocooned from reality, has no one in his high-level staff able to tell him what's actually happening, and has created a culture of denial and loyalty that makes fixing mistakes or holding people accountable all but impossible.

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?

I think of these imperial adventures like welfare programs; you start them with all good intentions, they never end, they go on forever and get more expensive as they go on.

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.

I believe that there are moments in sex that are so awesome that they actually reflect God.

I think there were two great gay Americans obviously, and that was Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.

You know, American citizens, I don't think, ever thought that the right to the pursuit of happiness did not include the right to marry the person you love. But for a whole number of Americans, gay Americans, that happens to be true.

If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated by strangers.

There is something about hearing your president affirm your humanity that you don't know what effect it has until you hear it.

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column.

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.

Although I never publicly defended promiscuity, I never publicly attacked it. I attempted to avoid the subject, in part because I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.

I purge compulsively. I'm constantly shedding things.

Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.

If you change the society and a culture, the politics will follow.

Love is about control and loss of control. In love, we give ourselves up to each other. We lose control or, rather, we cede control to another, trusting in a way we would never otherwise trust, letting the other person hold the deepest part of our being in their hands, with the capacity to hurt it mortally. This cession of control is a deeply terrifying thing, which is why we crave it and are drawn to it like moths to the flame, and why we have to trust it unconditionally. In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother's breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other's nakedness ...
And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt.

You just have to keep going. I mean I think our job, my job, is to keep articulating that I exist and that there are lots of people like me exist and we just have no home.

I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age - and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please.

"The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere.

"I'm working on it.

The day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It's coming for the anti-war movement.

I do not believe that the truth can ever be in conflict with God.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everybody's gay.

[T]he pied beauty of humanity should not be carved into acceptable and unacceptable based on things that simply make us who we are.

I watched Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle. Good grief. What whining weenies.

I think you earn your reputation for honesty and integrity literally hour-by-hour, and taste for that matter.

What's great about it is that you see, the great struggle for gay people is that the politics is just not going to work for us.

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.

We've got fuel prices coming down and good travel numbers coming out, so it's not surprising airline stocks are going up.

The first person I came out to was God. And the first conversation I ever had with anybody was in prayer.

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.

If you teach people that something as deep inside them as their very personality is either a source of unimaginable shame or unmentionable sin, and if you tell them that their only ethical direction is either the suppression of that self in a life of suffering or a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation, then it is perhaps not surprising that their moral and sexual behavior becomes wildly dichotic; that it veers from compulsive activity to shame and withdrawal; or that it becomes anesthetized by drugs or alcohol or fatally distorted by the false, crude ideology of easy prophets. A

Unlike a variety of other relationships,friendship requires an acknowledgement by both parties that they are involved or it fails to exist.

Michael Moore: a man who never without an excuse for keeping murdering tyrants in power. But now he's supporting the man who bombed Milosevic into submission? How about an explanation, Mr Moore?

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

I'm openly gay because I'm a Catholic.

For me, God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit have always been my closest friends in this journey.

No American should be forced to choose between their spouse and their country.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

I think very few people are gay. I'm a two-percenter myself.

I've always been a pretty candid person. I'm not a very secretive person; I'm not a very discreet person. One of my best friends once described me as pathologically indiscreet.

Homophobia: the fear that another man will treat you like you treat women.

My father has been a rock for me every since.

My own view is simply that there are some very basic rules; very simple rules that apply to all writing in a way, which is: don't lie; if you're wrong, correct; do not misrepresent; and try and keep oneself intellectually honest - which means, as a writer, the very difficult task in public of admitting you were wrong.

I think sex is completely absurdly demonized in our culture. But in the end, however much sex you want to have, with however many people in how many ways, to be loved and to love is what human beings really want.

The Tea Party we were told is only about economics; not true. It was always about economics and social issues. They just hid the social issues and now we just see who they really are.

The good news about me is that my friends and social network is entirely independent of politics.

Homophobia whether internalized or externalized is really fear; it's not hatred, it's fear. It's fear of the truth about ourselves.

Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness.

The most successful marriages, gay or straight, even if they begin in romantic love, often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last.

We currently have a government planning to go to Mars, heal broken marriages, and build bridges to nowhere - and also one that cannot wage a war competently, cannot respond to a hurricane adequately, and cannot enforce borders. Is it too much to ask that it get the basic things right before embarking on grandiose schemes?

It has been said that a person's religion is best defined not by what he says what he believes but by what he actually does.Equally, it could be said that one's friends are simply those people with whom one spends one's life.Period.Anything else is a form of rationalization.
Perhaps the criterion of 'People with whom one spends one's life is better reframed as people on whom one spends one's emotional energies.

In many ways, my attachment to human freedom was completely compatible with my right to live freely as a homosexual.

It's also one thing to see a celebrity or some kind of character on a TV show being gay. It's a totally different thing when you know your husband ... not your husband, but your brother or your friend or the dude you hung out in high school was gay. I mean, that is what changes people's minds, what changes people's minds.

In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes.

I think a lot of people are afraid the truth is in conflict with God. And are unable to let go and let the truth of the world.

If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.

I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking.

[Bush Hating] undermines the good faith necessary for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al Franken are all about.

I enjoy being around people who disagree with me; and I enjoy being in non-political contexts and activities.

What I love about the Internet and what I try to do on the issues is insist upon the ability to have bad taste if one wants.

Personally, I'd rather have pins stuck in my eyes than endure a conversation with John Kerry, but I'd love to hang with Bush.

And, impossible though it may be, we will have to resist partisanship. The only way back to a free society, to a country where no one need fear the president's wrath or impulses, is to unwind the factionalism that has helped destroy this country. We have to forge a new coalition on right and left to resist fascism's reach and cultic power. In a country which just elected and re-elected a black president - whose grace feels now almost painful to recall - it is surely possible.

The current Human Rights Commission's working group is made up of the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. No, I'm not making that up.

Al Gore's problem, in my view, is that he never liked politics. He's actually deeply uncomfortable in it but felt he had to do it because of his father. He's much more comfortable in a private sector role and has, in fact, been much more successful in a private sector role, and I admire him for that.

[D]id you really expect fairness on the environmental issue? For a swathe of reporters, this is not a matter of empirical reporting; it's a matter of faith. Bush cannot be pro-environment because he's Bush.

When a reporter is quoting Sid Blumenthal on president Bush, you know he's scraping the barrel.

I've never been a partisan, I've never been a Republican, I've never been a Democrat, ever, which is why I was very frustrated being called a gay Republican when I never attached myself to that.

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.

[T]he myth that there was somehow a magic wand in the early 1980s to cure AIDS - a wand that Reagan deliberately refused to wave - is now almost conventional wisdom.

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.

When I was about eight, I asked my mother if it was true that God knows everything about you. When she answered yes, I said, 'Then there's no hope for me, Mum.'

I'm not going to sit around an pretend I'm not thinking things on my blog when I am thinking them and when I'm open to rebuttal.

Homosexuality is like the weather. It just is.

I'm gay. I always have been and I always will be, and I'm happy.

Not many people sleep with other men and when the other man leaves have a nervous breakdown.

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.

The essence of romantic love is not the company of a lover but the pursuit.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.

Here's why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.

Every generation is born into, for the most part, a heterosexual family.

I don't fit into any demographic, I never really have. But that's true of lots of us, especially people my age and younger who've grown up with complicated identities, because life has gotten more complicated, and in which we don't want to be defined by any single one of them, but are happy to present many facets of our interests and personalities.