- “Here is the truth: The Earth is round; Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11; Elvis is dead; Obama was born in the United States; and the climate crisis is real.”
- “The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.”
- “In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important – and often more profitable – than to be civil or creative or truly original.”
- “As many know, the Chinese expression for “crisis” consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for “danger,” the second the symbol for “opportunity.””
- “Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.”
- “You can’t be value free when it comes to marriage.”
- “We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.”
- “The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.”
- “Air travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.”
- “We can believe in the future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in balance.”
- “Most people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that. I draw energy from discussing ideas.”
- “No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.”
- “The rule of reason is the true sovereign in the American system.”
- “I actually thought and believed that the story would be compelling enough to cause a real sea change in the way Congress reacted to that issue. I thought they would be startled, too. And they weren’t.”
- “The ‘well-informed citizenry’ is in danger of becoming the ‘well-amused audience’.”
- “The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.”
- “Political will is a renewable resource.”
- “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, ‘Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”
- “Leadership means inspiring us to manage through our fears. Demagoguery means exploiting our fears for political gain.”
- “The inner structure of liberty is is a double helix: one strand – political freedom – spirals upward with the other strand – economic freedom. But the two strands, though intertwined, must remain separate in order for the structure of freedom to maintain its integrity.”
- “The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.”
- “Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.”
Catherine Ingram
December 16, 0202
