Top 30 Zephyr Teachout Quotes

A government should not become too big to fulfill one of its most basic functions: representation.

Women are routinely demeaned, dismissed, discouraged and assaulted. Too many women’s careers are stymied or ended because of harassment and abuse. In politics, where I have worked much of my adult life, this behavior is rampant.

Normally, politicians lie because they want to persuade us of the truth of what they are saying. A candidate for Congress will claim that he earned a medal of honor when he did not, so that we will love and revere him.

The federal government has shown little willingness to stand up to corporate monopolies, and use its powers under the existing antitrust statutes, including the powerful Clayton Act and Sherman Act.

Mom and pop shops paying taxes while Amazon got billions just to come to town didn’t seem right, and, post-FoxxConn, people are less likely to fall for the promised jobs numbers.

Creating systems where people feel like they’re being punished for things they didn’t do wrong breaks all kinds of trust and makes people feel like they’re not being treated with dignity.

I joke about it being a millstone, but it never hurts to have a name that sticks out.

So one of the things I want to focus on is how we can show how taking on private financing is taking on this fundamental democratic threat.

I mean this is a revolution in how campaigns work – more money was spent by super PACs than by either myself or John Faso. So what that means is that if you’re a voter in this district you are more likely to have heard from a super PAC than from me or my opponent.

You build massive databases, you learn everything you can about the people in those databases, you figure out exactly how they can be useful to your campaign, and you ask them to donate money, door-knock, the virtual equivalent of being a sort of army of stamp lickers.

If we don’t have a responsive democracy, all the debates about charter schools, and fracking, and high-stakes testing, and the militarization of police forces – all of which are issues I care about – they aren’t real debates.

Parties are fun, but they don’t create community.

I have always wanted to run for Attorney General, and I always wanted to have a baby, but I did not think I would be doing them at the same time.

It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.

Congress is corrupt, gridlocked, broken, dysfunctional. It’s not working and we need it working again. It’s not going to get fixed by people who are deeply, in one way or another, inside this really broken system.

So paid media is when you buy an ad – typically in a presidential campaign that will be in Iowa, New Hampshire, the early states. It costs some money to make the ad, but the greatest cost is in actually placing the ad on TV.

Everybody’s always going to have some self-interest. When it passes a certain point, that’s when it become corruption.

We need to ban outside income for elected officials. Transparency alone is not enough; it doesn’t solve the problem of creating outside dependencies.

Most of the corruption in Albany is legal corruption, not illegal bribery. It comes from campaigns being funded by millionaires and corporations.

You may think of Google as a single organic entity, but in 2011 it bought a different company every week.

Voters have a responsibility to make a judgment with whatever facts are available on Election Day.

Dependence on private money to run campaigns causes pain to Republicans and Democrats alike – and business owners. It’s time we did something about it. And public financing of elections should be the first step.

Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it’s not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.

The science doesn’t prove Common Core’s effective. So I guess what I mean is science is an essential part of any decision-making process, and so is public involvement. And in the long-term, you lose legitimacy and power if you don’t directly engage with the public.

I see the job of attorney general as the single most important legal office in the country when you can’t trust the federal government.

To be fair, money and politics never work in a directly straight line.

At their best, new media are chaotic. The new technologies disrupt political pomp and glamour and engage people in an unpolished and unpredictable give-and-take. They also give citizens access to a surprising depth of raw information.

In the absence of relative equality – quid pro quo – a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.

It’s said that history inevitably marches toward democracy, but it only leaves the possibility of democracy, and the constant threat that it would be eroded by big money.

There’s this myth out there that self-perpetuates that candidates believe that although the populace cares about corruption, they’re not going to vote on it.