Top 30 Charlie Pierce Quotes

The creative project of self-government – hard and frustrating but necessary – is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene.

‘We, The People’ is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other.

If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels.

Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.

To recognize that head injuries were as essential a part of football as they are of boxing would be to erase the fine distinction on which the game’s respectability rested.

Gradually, football has seen its appeal slip at the most basic levels. Pediatricians are advising parents not to let young children play organized football too early in life.

Launching a newspaper without a coherent idea of how you’re going to promote it, or get it to people who might want to read it, is like launching a boat without a rudder or an engine… or a hull, now that I think about it.

The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime.

This has been the new normal since September 11. Everyone knows, but nobody says, that if something happens again, the elite consensus in this country, and the overwhelming consensus of the citizenry, will be to pitch the Bill of Rights out the window and start rounding folks up.

In 1989, my father died after a prolonged struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. All four of his siblings followed him into the shadow lands of that fascinating, maddening affliction.

At the time of his death, John Kennedy had a national security establishment that was a writhing ball of snakes.

According to the people who dearly would love to throw him out of office, Barack Obama was elected to be ‘above politics.’ He wasn’t elected to be president, after all. He was elected as an avatar of American tolerance. His attempts to get himself reelected imply a certain, well, ingratitude.

As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.

Nobody loves the Boston Marathon as much as the people who make fun of it year after year. This was the race that previously offered as a prize a not particularly expensive medal, a laurel wreath, and a bowl of beef stew. This was the race that, on one memorable occasion, nobody knew who actually won.

If you offer athletes stipends, then you’re into pay-for-play, and that’s the ballgame. People should realize that, and they should realize that amateurism never has been a sustainable model for a sports-entertainment industry. It wasn’t in tennis. It wasn’t in the Olympics. And it’s not in big-time college sports.

In the fall of 1989, I was writing 600-word columns at the ‘Herald.’ My heart always was in long-form narrative writing, though. It’s what I cut my teeth on at the ‘Boston Phoenix.’

There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.

We have a revolutionary history to honor and uphold. Which was what Nelson Mandela did. He reminded us of that which we need to be reminded, over and over again, about our own best selves.

Paul Ryan hasn’t lacked for a job since he left college as the golden child of Wisconsin Republican politics, riding his family connections into a job with then-Senator Bob Kasten.

The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.

Obama ran as sane and decent, as though we were electing a mood, and not necessarily a set of policies. Unfortunately, Obama has governed the same way – and misread the mood, which is all there is, really, because being crazy and stupid is all we’re really good at politically any more.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

We owe each other a debt and we owe each other an obligation, and because of these fundamental American imperatives, there are things that we own in common with each other, and that we are obliged to protect for our posterity. The water. The trees. The wild places in the land. We lose sight of these truths sometimes.

As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer’s because it attacks the two things most central to a writer’s craft – language and memory, which together make up an individual’s identity. Alzheimer’s makes a new character out of a familiar person.

The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank’s marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id.

We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.

Football was always a deal we made with ourselves. We adopted it for its brutality, which was embedded in a context that happened to be perfectly suited to television and to gambling, but which we could convince ourselves was only incidental to our enjoyment because it was only incidental to the game itself.

School districts around the country, and the taxpayers that support them, have a moral right to the information the NFL might have concerning the medical aspects of the game, and to assess the risks to the students in their charge. Colleges have a moral right to that information for the same reasons.

One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimer’s – and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you – is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so.

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.