Robert Nozick Quotes
Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?
Robert Nozick, 1938–2002), Political Philosopher, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Responding to a journalists question of whether he understood a bill he had just voted upon:
This is one of the earliest examples of the phrase “do nothing Congress” which Harry S Truman made so famous in his re-election campaign. Clearly Linney did not originate the phrase but his may be the earliest documented usage.
He was referring to a transportation bill that had been packed with earmarks and pork by his own party.
The Chairmen of the Committees then had tremendous, almost unilateral power. The chairman reached seniority by being elected over and over and had little opposition. At the time they were almost all older Democratic Congressmen from the "Solid South", very conservative and still racists despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were outraged when a Freshmen member of Congress who rarely made a public statement, took on the most powerful members of the House and wanted to reform the Seniority. But Ms. Chisholm was a teacher in her professional life, and by challenging the seniority system and attracting the enmity of most of the Chairmen, the media and the public started to cover the dispute and Chisholm explained to America exactly how the system worked and how undemocratic and racist it was. Her effort put the Seniority System on the public agenda, and reforms evolved over the next decades." She was the first Black woman to be elected to Congress and was the first Black woman to actively campaign for the Presidency
This was a parody on the adage, “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.”
Describing Texas Senator Robert Kruger who had been appointed to Bestsen's seat and was having trouble getting elected in his own right. Kruger lost his bid for election.
as a result of the Watergate hearings and investigations and proceedings
After his presidency, Calvin Coolidge was approached to determine his interest in becoming the president of his alma mater, Amherst College:
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Philosophical Explanations (1981), which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into. His other work involved ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His final work before his death, Invariances (2001), introduced his theory of evolutionary cosmology, by which he argues invariances, and hence objectivity itself, emerged through evolution across possible worlds.
