8 Quotes by Adam Kotsko

It doesn’t have to be perfect to be better than a hotbed of rape threats and Nazi memes.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in the latest styles from Old Navy, and laid him in a shopping cart, because they were waiting in line to get into Walmart.

We ask 18-year-olds to make huge decisions about their career and financial future, when a month ago they had to ask to go to the bathroom.

You can’t have a “debate” with people who constantly tell crazy lies. Pretending you can only legitimates their crazy lies.

That is the great danger of meritocracy: the people who reach the top of the system are precisely the people who have most completely identified with the system and its demands, creating a vicious circle preventing any actual change. It is no accident that conservatives tend to employ the rhetoric of social mobility so readily, as social climbers generally do not ask questions about the ladder.

White male hegemony may turn out to be finite, but white male creepiness is eternal.

Obviously simplicity isn’t an unalloyed good – existentialism might be more like jumbling everything together into boxes and sorting it out when you get there, which is a suitable approach for the dorm rooms of those who most enjoy existentialism but less helpful for a more fully-developed adult household.

And that’s because liberals are mistaken in the most fundamental way: they have not simply misjudged their enemy’s priorities or strategies, they have misjudged the very situation in which they find themselves. They think they are dealing with a debate partner rather than an enemy.