Zephyr Teachout Quotes
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As a school board member, I might have particular views about the ways we might increase the economics curriculum in a local high school, but I'm not sure I should mandate that for the entire country.
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I don't have any particular plans in mind. What I see is that you can become so focused on the idea of running that winning becomes your motivation, as opposed to what you stand for being your motivation.
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It's a lot harder to push forward things, like energy policy. There's a big dream out there about wind and solar power.
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I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.
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Integrity is hard work. I do think the internet makes it harder because of the temptations of performance. You can perform and have integrity, but it's easier just to perform. So the temptations of social media lead to some dissonance.
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A combination of working in politics as well as teaching and being [an actor] certainly helped. I became so much more comfortable in front of a crowd. I felt like I was calling on all those other experiences.
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Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it.
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What happens in New York affects national policy in very significant ways.
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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.
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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.
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If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.
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I tend to think that knowledge is preceded by power instead of the other way around.
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Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.
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You can't just provide power, you also need public education.
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You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.
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I tend to be a kind of left federalist. There's a value to more power of certain kinds being positioned at a more local level.