Amity Shlaes Quotes & Sayings

“Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.”

“With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.'”

“Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future's forgotten men.”

“People value Halloween, like Valentine's Day, because they can tell themselves that it's not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.”

“Seems like Americans just want it to be Halloween all year. The holiday just keeps getting more popular.”

“Policy people suffer their own kind of agony, and no wonder. After all, what is the average life of the policy person? You go into government if you are lucky, do your best, aren't appreciated, take all the blame for policies for which you are only partly responsible, leave, realize your reputation has been damaged, maybe permanently.”

“Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries' abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency.”

“Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.”

“Although unions may be good for a worker, singular, they are not always good for workers, plural. Especially when it comes to finding a job.”

“There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.”