Joe > Joe's Quotes

“Decisions are made by those who show up”
― Aaron Sorkin

“The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The Pieces are in flux. Soon, They will SETTLE again. Before They do, let us RE-ORDER this world around us!!!”
― Tony Blair

“Americans Never Quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We Make History.
-John McCain”
― John McCain

“The moral values and integrity of our nation, and the long, difficult, fraught history of our efforts to uphold them at home and abroad, are the test of every American generation. Will we act in this world with respect for our founding conviction that all people have equal dignity in the eyes of God and should be accorded the same respect by the laws and governments of men? That is the most important question history ever asks of us.”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood”
― John McCain, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations

“No government should be given too much power, or the people comprising that government will use the power in the worst ways possible; individual freedom, when used within the boundaries of morality, is the highest good. The Constitution was written as a living testimony to this view.”
― Andrew Breitbart, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!

“Telling the truth is fun.”
― Andrew Breitbart, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!

“Walk toward the fire. Don’t worry about what they call you. All those things are said against you because they want to stop you in your tracks. But if you keep going, you’re sending a message to people who are rooting for you, who are agreeing with you. The message is that they can do it, too.”
― Andrew Breitbart

“...It is a proud privilege to be a soldier – a good soldier … [with] discipline, self-respect, pride in his unit and his country, a high sense of duty and obligation to comrades and to his superiors, and a self confidence born of demonstrated ability.”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“To be heroic is to be courageous enough to die for something; to be inspirational is to be crazy enough to live a little.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.”
― James A. Michener, Poland

“A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in.. And how many want out.”
― Tony Blair

“The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.”
― Tony Blair

“What matters is what works.”
― Tony Blair

“To save our democracy, Americans need to restore the basic norms that once protected it. But we must do more than that. We must extend those norms through the whole of a diverse society. We must make them truly inclusive. America's democratic norms, at their core, have always been sound. But for much of our history, they were accompanied - indeed, sustained - by racial exclusion. Now those norms must be made to work in an age of racial equality and unprecedented ethnic diversity. Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will truly be exceptional.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

“Two basic norms have preserved America’s checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

“One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion. Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

“Opposition to the Trump administration's authoritarian behavior should be muscular, but it should seek to preserve, rather than violate, democratic rules and norms. Where possible, opposition should center on Congress, the courts, and, of course, elections. If Trump is defeated via democratic institutions, it will strengthen those institutions.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

“In politics, If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”
― Margaret Thatcher

“What matters isn't the stories themselves; it's how the stories end.”
― Nikki Haley, Can't Is Not an Option: My American Story

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
― Robert F. Kennedy

“I waved him over, looking as harmless as I could. My reporter trick is to play dumb and friendly; dumb and friendly is always more approachable than eager and prodding.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“Consensus: “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?”
― Margaret Thatcher

“The first rule in politics is that there are no rules, at least not in the sense of inevitable defeats or inevitable victories. If you have the right policy and the right strategy, you always have a chance of winning. Without them, you can lose no matter how certain the victory seems.”
― Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life

“If a person can grow through unthinkable trauma and loss, perhaps a nation may, too.”
― Jamie Raskin, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

“Memory requires active engagement with the complexities of the past. It is not an unthinking or passive process, like breathing or (for most people) sleeping. I have found that good memory, like good history, requires disciplined and focused attention, an honest effort to overcome one's perceptual and cognitive biases, and sustained effort.”
― Jamie Raskin, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

“Tyrants tell stories only about themselves because history for them begins and ends with their own insatiable appetites.”
― Jamie Raskin, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
― George Washington

“99% of failures come from people who make excuses.”
― George Washington