Eugene Jarecki Quotes & Sayings

“We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.”

“My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.”

“The whole idea of a democracy is that we ourselves, the people, are supposed to make a path of our politics, and it is we who with our feet and our vote and our labors and our vigilance are supposed to shape our country.”

“The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn't do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.”

“Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.”

“If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.”

“Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mama's boy and he said no, more of a papa's boy. At the same time he was willing to say that his father had many shortcomings and needed to be held accountable.”

“He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of the largest wealth redistributions in American history, away from the poor and toward the rich.”

“His track record of pragmatism, depth and candor all speak to a person who would find the Tea Party simplistic, opportunistic and misguided. Reagan was surrounded by some very smart people who gave him very sound advice. They were not wondering where certain countries are on the map.”

“Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks - through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda - to present an image of Reagan that is so much larger-than-life that it sort of blinds us all, and keeps us all in a warm, happy, nostalgic state, thinking of a man who can do no wrong.”