Best 91 quotes of Andrew Sullivan on MyQuotes

Al Gore's problem, in my view, is that he never liked politics. He's actually deeply uncomfortable in it but felt he had to do it because of his father. He's much more comfortable in a private sector role and has, in fact, been much more successful in a private sector role, and I admire him for that.

All s, like all human beings, get many things wrong. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary achievement as of the U.S. was to succeed in getting the two biggest challenges of his time right: defeating the Soviet Union and reviving the American economy and spirit. Neither of those achievements was inevitable. Both were fiercely opposed at the time. But he persisted; his visionary focus matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric.

Although I never publicly defended promiscuity, I never publicly attacked it. I attempted to avoid the subject, in part because I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.

A mind is a wonderful thing to change.

Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.

Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Bush has legitimized a huge expansion of the welfare state, liberalizing immigration, and using force for democratization abroad. All the next Democratic president has to do to finish Bush's hard work is to raise taxes to pay for it all.

[Bush Hating] undermines the good faith necessary for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al Franken are all about.

[D]id you really expect fairness on the environmental issue? For a swathe of reporters, this is not a matter of empirical reporting; it's a matter of faith. Bush cannot be pro-environment because he's Bush.

Don't fool yourself that you're blogging when you're really just putting stuff up online.

For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships - certainly far more so than romantic love. Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person.

For me, God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit have always been my closest friends in this journey.

Here’s why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.

Homophobia: the fear that another man will treat you like you treat women.

Homophobia whether internalized or externalized is really fear; it's not hatred, it's fear. It's fear of the truth about ourselves.

Homosexuality is like the weather. It just is.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

I enjoy being around people who disagree with me; and I enjoy being in non-political contexts and activities.

I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.

If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated by strangers.

If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.

I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?

I'm not going to sit around an pretend I'm not thinking things on my blog when I am thinking them and when I'm open to rebuttal.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everybody's gay.

I must say that the Katrina response does help me better understand the situation in Iraq. The best bet is that the president doesn't actually know what's happening there, is cocooned from reality, has no one in his high-level staff able to tell him what's actually happening, and has created a culture of denial and loyalty that makes fixing mistakes or holding people accountable all but impossible.

In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes.

In many ways, my attachment to human freedom was completely compatible with my right to live freely as a homosexual.

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.

Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques is true?

I think a blog to live really has to be probably four or five times a day.

I think a lot of people are afraid the truth is in conflict with God. And are unable to let go and let the truth of the world.

I think essentially corrupting institutions in Washington are turning conservatism into something that is really very creepy, but also emotionally and psychically powerful for people.

I think of these imperial adventures like welfare programs; you start them with all good intentions, they never end, they go on forever and get more expensive as they go on.

I think sex is completely absurdly demonized in our culture. But in the end, however much sex you want to have, with however many people in how many ways, to be loved and to love is what human beings really want.

I think there were two great gay Americans obviously, and that was Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.

I think you earn your reputation for honesty and integrity literally hour-by-hour, and taste for that matter.

It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.

It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.

It's also one thing to see a celebrity or some kind of character on a TV show being gay. It's a totally different thing when you know your husband... not your husband, but your brother or your friend or the dude you hung out in high school was gay. I mean, that is what changes people's minds, what changes people's minds.

It's only because you can now watch cheerfully biased Fox News that you begin to realize how cheerlessly biased CNN really is - and always was. Or CBS. Or ABC. Or the BBC.

I've never been a partisan, I've never been a Republican, I've never been a Democrat, ever, which is why I was very frustrated being called a gay Republican when I never attached myself to that.

I was also reminded of one of the unique charms of NYC in the summer: vast piles of rotting garbage piled on the sidewalks, with that sweet yet nauseating smell of decomposing groceries sitting in the humid fetid air, and rancid food juices oozing over the sticky sidewalks. With my windows open to counter the stuffiness, I could occasionally catch a whiff of the stench outside. People actually like living in this chaotic, fetid monument to incompetence? Beats me.

I watched Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle. Good grief. What whining weenies.

Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views raises the specter of domestic repression. But in a country with a First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly overrepresented.

Michael Moore: a man who never without an excuse for keeping murdering tyrants in power. But now he's supporting the man who bombed Milosevic into submission? How about an explanation, Mr Moore?

Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.