Charlie Pierce famous quotes

06-14-2025

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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Self #Honor #Needs
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Struggle #Effort #Weakness
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#People #Dames #Disease
We, The People is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other.
-- Charlie Pierce

#People #Purpose #Acknowledgement
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Memories #Character #Two
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Kings #Men #Years
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Hands #Law #Roots
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Congratulations #Pride #Self
Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Damage #Horrible
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#College #Deceit #Fundamentals
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Heart #Government #May
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Ignorance #Squares #Doe
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Wall #Shadow #Monsters
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Government #Important #Matter
Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Optimistic #Optimism #Despair
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.
-- Charlie Pierce

#Government #Self #Order

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