Quotes from Zephyr Teachout

It's one of those secrets that not a lot of politicians realize: The Internet is not a 10th-tier policy issue. It's not an add-on policy. It's something that affects everybody's life.

Everybody's always going to have some self-interest. When it passes a certain point, that's when it become corruption.

Every politician should go and spend time and visit prisons and jails. Because if you are choosing to exercise this kind of power over another person's life, there's a role for that, but you have to know the kind of power you are exercising.

Women's voices need to be in politics, and shaping politics from the very beginning, not serve as an afterthought.

I mean this is a revolution in how campaigns work - more money was spent by super PACs than by either myself or John Faso. So what that means is that if you're a voter in this district you are more likely to have heard from a super PAC than from me or my opponent.

Voters have a responsibility to make a judgment with whatever facts are available on Election Day.

Normally, politicians lie because they want to persuade us of the truth of what they are saying. A candidate for Congress will claim that he earned a medal of honor when he did not, so that we will love and revere him.

The work of being a citizen is hard and annoying, but it can pay off.

I hope the true public servants learn from this that they should not be afraid and they will get incredible grass-roots support if they call out corruption.

One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics.

There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.

I think the reason you see so many people dropping out of politics is because there's an anti-poetic strain in modern political discourse.

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

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

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?"

If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.

History is a series of mistakes. Now the task is to plan for those mistakes so those of us who are populists can actually take over the reins of power when the right mistakes are made.

Collective decisions about health care and education are best answered on a local level.

I care about dental care, and ending mass private and public surveillance, and funding schools so they can have small class sizes.

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.

There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

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.

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

It's a lot harder to push forward things, like energy policy. There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power.