Zephyr Teachout Quotes

I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.

Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.

My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.

I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

I think a lot of the reason people are attracted to the Keystone pipeline is because at least we're doing something. There's a fear that society will collapse if it's not acting. To contrast those actions with other actions is important in making it feel plausible. Maybe we must have the size of the dream meet the size of the threat.

I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.

People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.

Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it.

The two national powers that dominated the colonies, France and Britain, represented two different models of corruption. Britain was seen as a failed ideal. It was corrupted republic, a place where the premise of government was basically sound but civic virtue - that of the public and public officials - was degenerating. On the other hand, France was seen as more essentially corrupt, a nation in which there was no true polity, but instead exchanges of luxury for power; a nation populated by weak subjects and flattering courtiers. Britain was the greater tragedy, because it held the promise of integrity, whereas France was simply something of a civic cesspool.

People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, "Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?"

Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.

There are some libertarians who are really anarchists, but others are more concerned about the distant relationship between themselves and power. They mistakenly think they want to get rid of government when instead they might just want to have greater access to power.

Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.

In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.

If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.

A combination of working in politics as well as teaching and being [an actor] certainly helped. I became so much more comfortable in front of a crowd. I felt like I was calling on all those other experiences.

What I see increasingly is that companies are playing political roles. We should actually have our research and our laws map that.

You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.

I tend to be a kind of left federalist. There's a value to more power of certain kinds being positioned at a more local level.

You can't just provide power, you also need public education.