38 Quotes by Kurt Andersen

We're focusing on particular works films, books, pieces of music, architecture that deserve the name 'icon' and have this influence on our culture. Everybody knows those things, but almost because they're icons, people don't look below the fact of them.

We got 200 e-mails (about it). Lots of people had the same reaction. They were assigned to read it in school and didn't. We try to take things that sometimes people turn off of because they're introduced to them too early or for some other reason, and try to make them entertaining.

It is so much the first among equals of that world.

It's high and low (culture), and we're casting a net wide. Almost everyone knows of these things; it's not like we're bringing them some obscure things.

Maybe the reality-based fractions of red and blue America are reaching a sort of consensus: Just as Republicans are beginning to get why George Bush makes so many Americans want to rip their hair out, a lot of Democrats have finally, viscerally come to understand Clinton-loathing. Mutual, symmetrical disillusionment; it's a start.

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment.

TED was simply wonderful, an intellectual spa, a 21st-century Chataqua, superb and singular.

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it’s good for our ideological investment.

Let me quote once more from Tolkien’s lecture, which he delivered a few months before the fantasy-besotted Nazis started World War II. “Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came.