ContraPoints Quotes

I think there are some liberals who are extremely biased about Fox News and wish to shun it or wish to criticize any liberal who appears on Fox News. That, to me, is not a particularly liberal attitude.

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment.

At the end of the day, Americans are not so keen on ideologues, people who have such fixed positions that they can't see any virtue in the other side's point of view.

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?'

If I had a worldview, and I don't know if I do, but if I did, it's one that's intensely humanistic.

I love experiencing other people's realities, seeing the world through their eyes for a short period of time.

I love meeting new people; I think everyone has a story to tell. We should all listen sometimes.

The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the same time, I think there are some things that liberals are right about that conservatives have trouble seeing.

I think that liberals need to grow up.

It seems to me that more and more we've come to expect less and less from each other, and I think that should change.

I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.

There are many things that people do happily that I can't imagine why they would do it... But I have to say that even though I am critical or judgmental of society at large, I'm not critical of people individually. We are who we are.

I didn't knowingly meet a conservative until, to my shame, I was 60 years old and sat down and said, 'Wow, I don't understand what this guy's talking about, but he has a great civility about him. Perhaps I better investigate this thing.'

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative.

I'm not 100 percent anybody's ideological prism.

My only wish is... to transform friends of God into friends of man.

When you talk, you only talk about something that you already know. But when you listen, you can learn something you don’t know.

… people never become a mass, they remain entities, and so you are able to feel human suffering and make others feel it because it is represented to you by individuals

Liberals can understand everything, but people who don’t understand them.

The politicians are not the only people who are in their own silos. Many of our citizens only watch or listen to the news that they want to hear, and if there is anything else, they turn it off. We all need to listen to the people who are on the other side.

There is no inherent contradiction between being right-wing and being intelligent.

It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That's not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as 'the other side.'

I love figuring out a stranger, sitting down and learning about their loves and struggles and everything. People are my jam.

I live in places where, although I don't take public stands, I'm surrounded by liberals, and I've spent a lot of time in this country talking to people who have very different views than the people I live around and trying to see kind of what's in common beneath those conversations.