Andrew Sullivan Quotes & Sayings

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

My father has been a rock for me every since. — Andrew Sullivan

And, impossible though it may be, we will have to resist partisanship. The only way back to a free society, to a country where no one need fear the president's wrath or impulses, is to unwind the factionalism that has helped destroy this country. We have to forge a new coalition on right and left to resist fascism's reach and cultic power. In a country which just elected and re-elected a black president - whose grace feels now almost painful to recall - it is surely possible. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship. — Andrew Sullivan

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

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. — Andrew Sullivan

Most hate is more common and more complicated, with as many varieties as there are varieties of love. Just as there is possessive love and needy love; family love and friendship; romantic love and unrequited love; passion and respect, affection and obsession, so hatred has its shadings. There is hate that fears, and hate that merely feels contempt; there is hate that expresses power, and hate that comes from powerlessness; there is revenge, and there is hate that comes from envy. There is hate that was love, and hate that is a curious expression of love. There is hate of the other, and hate of something that reminds us too much of ourselves. There is the oppressor's hate, and the victim's hate. There is hate that burns slowly, and hate that fades. And there is hate that explodes, and hate that never catches fire. — Andrew Sullivan

There is no escaping this fight. It is civilization or Jihadism. We can and should debate tactics; but the sides are clear enough. — Andrew Sullivan

Unlike a variety of other relationships,friendship requires an acknowledgement by both parties that they are involved or it fails to exist. — Andrew Sullivan

When a reporter is quoting Sid Blumenthal on president Bush, you know he's scraping the barrel. — Andrew Sullivan

We currently have a government planning to go to Mars, heal broken marriages, and build bridges to nowhere - and also one that cannot wage a war competently, cannot respond to a hurricane adequately, and cannot enforce borders. Is it too much to ask that it get the basic things right before embarking on grandiose schemes? — Andrew Sullivan

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

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. — Andrew Sullivan

If you think you'll find intellectual stimulation, you're thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I've never been more bored by casual chat. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

The Tea Party we were told is only about economics; not true. It was always about economics and social issues. They just hid the social issues and now we just see who they really are. — Andrew Sullivan

If you teach people that something as deep inside them as their very personality is either a source of unimaginable shame or unmentionable sin, and if you tell them that their only ethical direction is either the suppression of that self in a life of suffering or a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation, then it is perhaps not surprising that their moral and sexual behavior becomes wildly dichotic; that it veers from compulsive activity to shame and withdrawal; or that it becomes anesthetized by drugs or alcohol or fatally distorted by the false, crude ideology of easy prophets. A — Andrew Sullivan

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

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. — Andrew Sullivan

When I first started talking about gay marriage, most people in the gay community looked at me as if I was insane or possibly a fascist reactionary. — Andrew Sullivan

The day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It's coming for the anti-war movement. — Andrew Sullivan

Some of this is unavailable to the male-female union: there is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman; and again, the lack of children gives gay couples greater freedom. Their failures entail fewer consequences for others. But something of the gay's relationship's necessary honesty, its flexibility, and its equality could undoubtedly help strengthen and inform many heterosexual bonds. — Andrew Sullivan

When I was about eight, I asked my mother if it was true that God knows everything about you. When she answered yes, I said, 'Then there's no hope for me, Mum.' — Andrew Sullivan

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

Love is about control and loss of control. In love, we give ourselves up to each other. We lose control or, rather, we cede control to another, trusting in a way we would never otherwise trust, letting the other person hold the deepest part of our being in their hands, with the capacity to hurt it mortally. This cession of control is a deeply terrifying thing, which is why we crave it and are drawn to it like moths to the flame, and why we have to trust it unconditionally. In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother's breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other's nakedness ...
And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

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? — Andrew Sullivan

The one man more responsible for destroying the Democratic centrist revival, for throwing away the Clinton legacy, and for suicidally pitching his party to the populist left was Al Gore — Andrew Sullivan

We've got fuel prices coming down and good travel numbers coming out, so it's not surprising airline stocks are going up. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking. — Andrew Sullivan

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

[Senator] Kerry [democrat MA] is emerging as the worst of all the viable Democratic candidates. He has the backbone of Clinton and the charm of Gore. — Andrew Sullivan

The important things are not worth knowing because they are useful. They are worth knowing because they are true. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

Personally, I'd rather have pins stuck in my eyes than endure a conversation with John Kerry, but I'd love to hang with Bush. — Andrew Sullivan

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

When Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them. — Andrew Sullivan

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe. — Andrew Sullivan

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column. — Andrew Sullivan

The Dixiecrats meet again in New York. Now they're called Republicans. — Andrew Sullivan

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

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error? — Andrew Sullivan

I'm openly gay because I'm a Catholic. — Andrew Sullivan

The simple truth is that there isn't a single civil right I would deny to an evangelical Christian. I've defended their freedom of religion, of association, of disassociation, and believe they should be treated with respect. I wouldn't dream of drumming them out of the military, firing them for their faith, tearing up their relationships, or taking their children away from them. The favor, alas, is not returned. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

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

The relationship of black Americans to Obama is sociologically riveting. — Andrew Sullivan

Well, in the past, the size of government was one of the more fundamental dividing lines between Right and Left. The Right was supposed to represent the small government philosophy - limited spending, low taxes. Obviously, things have shifted. — Andrew Sullivan

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? — Andrew Sullivan

The success of the stock connect program and the increased market volatility means investors are looking for more products to access China markets performance than exchange traded funds, and futures are feeding that rising demand. — Andrew Sullivan

Every generation is born into, for the most part, a heterosexual family. — Andrew Sullivan

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

The most successful marriages, gay or straight, even if they begin in romantic love, often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves. — Andrew Sullivan

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up. — Andrew Sullivan

The current Human Rights Commission's working group is made up of the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. No, I'm not making that up. — Andrew Sullivan

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself. — Andrew Sullivan

The first person I came out to was God. And the first conversation I ever had with anybody was in prayer. — Andrew Sullivan

A mind is a wonderful thing to change. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy. — Andrew Sullivan

There is something about hearing your president affirm your humanity that you don't know what effect it has until you hear it. — Andrew Sullivan

Homosexuality is like the weather. It just is. — Andrew Sullivan

It is a Bush administration official on the moment when torture breaks a victim:
The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.
From Neil Gaiman's account of a torturer in hell:
We will hurt you. And we are not sorry. But we do not do it to punish you. We do it to redeem you. Because afterward, you'll be a better person ... and because we love you. One day you'll thank us for it.
War is peace. Torture is freedom. In the end, you love Big Brother. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

What's great about it is that you see, the great struggle for gay people is that the politics is just not going to work for us. — Andrew Sullivan

I do not believe that the truth can ever be in conflict with God. — Andrew Sullivan

Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

The good news about me is that my friends and social network is entirely independent of politics. — Andrew Sullivan

I purge compulsively. I'm constantly shedding things. — Andrew Sullivan

You just have to keep going. I mean I think our job, my job, is to keep articulating that I exist and that there are lots of people like me exist and we just have no home. — Andrew Sullivan

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

I believe that there are moments in sex that are so awesome that they actually reflect God. — Andrew Sullivan

It has been said that a person's religion is best defined not by what he says what he believes but by what he actually does.Equally, it could be said that one's friends are simply those people with whom one spends one's life.Period.Anything else is a form of rationalization.
Perhaps the criterion of 'People with whom one spends one's life is better reframed as people on whom one spends one's emotional energies. — Andrew Sullivan

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

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. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

I've always been a pretty candid person. I'm not a very secretive person; I'm not a very discreet person. One of my best friends once described me as pathologically indiscreet. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

The New York Times had not become The New York Times overnight. It had to earn its reputation day-by-day. — Andrew Sullivan

Obama is looking good because he kept his nerve and retained his restraint. That's a tough combo: nerve and restraint. It takes a cold-bloodedness to pull this off, and there are times when ice seems to run through the man's veins. — Andrew Sullivan

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set. — Andrew Sullivan

My own view is simply that there are some very basic rules; very simple rules that apply to all writing in a way, which is: don't lie; if you're wrong, correct; do not misrepresent; and try and keep oneself intellectually honest - which means, as a writer, the very difficult task in public of admitting you were wrong. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

I don't fit into any demographic, I never really have. But that's true of lots of us, especially people my age and younger who've grown up with complicated identities, because life has gotten more complicated, and in which we don't want to be defined by any single one of them, but are happy to present many facets of our interests and personalities. — Andrew Sullivan

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

[T]he myth that there was somehow a magic wand in the early 1980s to cure AIDS - a wand that Reagan deliberately refused to wave - is now almost conventional wisdom. — Andrew Sullivan

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. — Andrew Sullivan

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

What I love about the Internet and what I try to do on the issues is insist upon the ability to have bad taste if one wants. — Andrew Sullivan