Jon Katz Quotes

The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one.

My passion for ideas is not matched with a passion for partisan or electoral politics.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology.

Communism was something so hideous that you had to be an exceptional conformist or a fool not to see the evil around you.

Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies.

Facts are stubborn things.

There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think.

Organized into a movement or state and motivated by a cause that gives them passion and purpose, practitioners of political evil are capable of carrying out violence on levels that far surpass those realizable by any lone individual.

There is never just one way in politics.

Steve Ballmer never used to be someone who let facts speak for themselves. In the 1990s, he was the hyper-energetic Microsoft exec yelling 'Developers! Developers! Developers!' at an all-hands meeting in Safeco field.

I will never retire from politics, the revolution, or the ideas I have.

I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm.

I would consider myself more a passionate centrist.

I honestly don't see how anyone can view the GOP and the Right as anything but evil.

In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But theworks of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.

Its [Communism's] unfortunate association with violence encourages a certain evil tendency in human beings.

The most stormy ebullitions of passion, from blasphemy to murder, are less terrific than one single act of cool villainy.

Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel!

You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.

Microsoft is a company that manages imagination.

Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.