Top 140 Quotes & Sayings by Zephyr Teachout - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American lawyer Zephyr Teachout.
Last updated on April 16, 2025.
Refusing to grant clemency is a failure of one of the most basic jobs of being governor.
One of the things I care about a lot is public financing in elections.
The structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can't even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day.
Facebook and Google are essentially an advertising duopoly, and we have almost no idea how their algorithms work.
The science doesn't prove Common Core's effective. So I guess what I mean is science is an essential part of any decision-making process, and so is public involvement. And in the long-term, you lose legitimacy and power if you don't directly engage with the public.
My first job out of law school was representing people on death row in North Carolina, where I often saw the impact of hasty prosecutions.
When I was in college in the late 80s-early 90s, there was a sense that history was on a straight path toward democracy everywhere. Well, that's not true. It was also not true that there's a single era of oligarchy, because we showed we could do something about it.
It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.
Everybody's always going to have some self-interest. When it passes a certain point, that's when it become corruption.
It's always a fun game to go back and guess what long-past people would think.
Collective decisions about health care and education are best answered on a local level.
It is an honor to join 'The Nation's esteemed editorial board.
A government should not become too big to fulfill one of its most basic functions: representation.
My family lives in Vermont. I'm a law professor and I spend summers researching and writing in Vermont.
An intuitive part of the American ethos is a kind of protectiveness of the public's fear. We have to remember how unique that is. As scandal-ridden as we may be, we start with a basic expectation that it's not your job in public service to use it to help your friend.
I joke about it being a millstone, but it never hurts to have a name that sticks out.
It's said that history inevitably marches toward democracy, but it only leaves the possibility of democracy, and the constant threat that it would be eroded by big money.
We need to ban outside income for elected officials. Transparency alone is not enough; it doesn't solve the problem of creating outside dependencies.
I hope the true public servants learn from this that they should not be afraid and they will get incredible grass-roots support if they call out corruption.
As attorney general, I would work with my colleagues in other states to launch a major antitrust investigation to look into the ways in which Facebook and Google are wielding and may be abusing their duopoly powers.
At a policy level, we can support protecting and serving as opposed to militarization or disproportionate response. Step one is making sure we don't militarize and actually call for a review of military equipment in New York police forces.
Creating systems where people feel like they're being punished for things they didn't do wrong breaks all kinds of trust and makes people feel like they're not being treated with dignity.
Mom and pop shops paying taxes while Amazon got billions just to come to town didn't seem right, and, post-FoxxConn, people are less likely to fall for the promised jobs numbers.
Anti-corruption is a core constitutional value. It always has been.
Quid pro quo has an interesting history. It's originally a contract law term, not a criminal bribery term.
I am not Pollyannaish about the depths of the challenges we face.
I propose a full day of live one-on-one debates on unannounced issues, with no aides to help or reply. Each candidate would be paired with another candidate for seven 60-minute sessions.
Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it's not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.
Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.
The Internet doesn't just enable cool avatars and the shorter form. It also allows the deeper form: cross-linked blog posts, extensive research, simultaneous screens and raw debate footage that anyone can scan online, at any time.
Voters have a responsibility to make a judgment with whatever facts are available on Election Day.
Amazon's capitulation to those opposed to their expansion in New York City is an epic moment for people power over an enormous corporate bully.
Every constitutional standard is engaged in difficult but important line-drawing.
Every politician should go and spend time and visit prisons and jails. Because if you are choosing to exercise this kind of power over another person's life, there's a role for that, but you have to know the kind of power you are exercising.
The corruption that hides in plain sight is the real threat to our democracy.
Amazon's outsized power is looking less and less like smart business and more and more like oppressive politics - one company bullying us all.
The work of being a citizen is hard and annoying, but it can pay off.
In the absence of relative equality - quid pro quo - a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.
Normally, politicians lie because they want to persuade us of the truth of what they are saying. A candidate for Congress will claim that he earned a medal of honor when he did not, so that we will love and revere him.
I represented a man on death row whose lawyers had spent all of eight hours looking into his claim of innocence. I met men whose lawyers had never looked into their backgrounds.
If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.
My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.
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.
One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics.
This is what's so hard about our current politics: things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth.
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.
People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.
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.
Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.
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.
I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.
A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics.
In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.
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.
Things poll well, but people don't believe that politicians are telling the truth. Politicians might mention renewable energy, and the public will think, "That sounds good, but I don't believe they're going to do everything they can to build those towers."
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.
New York City is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change, so I see Keystone as the central threat to New York.
I think about people and events in terms of archetypes a lot.
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.
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.
Related Authors
Alan Dershowitz Quotes
American
Lawyer
Cass Sunstein Quotes
American
Lawyer
Cenk Uygur Quotes
Turkish
Lawyer
Clarence Darrow Quotes
American
Lawyer
Elizabeth Edwards Quotes
American
Lawyer
Elliott Abrams Quotes
American
Lawyer
James Carville Quotes
American
Lawyer
John Kennedy Quotes
American
Lawyer
Judy Sheindlin Quotes
American
Lawyer
Prashant Bhushan Quotes
Indian
Lawyer
Ralph Nader Quotes
American
Lawyer
Robert Green Ingersoll Quotes
American
Lawyer
Robin S. Sharma Quotes
Canadian
Lawyer
Robin Sharma Quotes
Canadian
Lawyer
Valerie Jarrett Quotes
American
Lawyer
William Jennings Bryan Quotes
American
Lawyer