Cass Sunstein Quotes

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Cass Sunstein

Profession : Lawyer

Birth : September 21, 1954

What unites Sanders, McCarthy, McGovern and Reagan is the unmistakable clarity of their moral convictions, their tendency to outrage, and their insistence that the United States needs to embark on a whole new path.

Cass Sunstein

Top 1 Percent progressivism emphasizes the idea of fairness - but it's nevertheless a politics of outrage, animated by at least a trace of envy. It's as if 'millionaires and billionaires' were the principal problem facing America today.

Cass Sunstein

Trump is more performance artist than zealot. But he's finding enemies everywhere, whether they are judges of Mexican ancestry, parents of those killed in war, the current president, or children of immigrants. Whether or not he has a sense of decency, he is in grave danger of losing it.

Cass Sunstein

After a two-term presidency, many young voters seem to want someone who is radically different from, even the opposite of, the commander in chief to whom they have become accustomed. After all, a two-term president will have led their nation for a significant percentage of their lives. That's boring. Isn't it time for a transformation?

Cass Sunstein

If there's a regulation that's saving 10,000 lives and costing one job, it's worth it.

Cass Sunstein

Television is, in many respects, a passive medium: people receive information without really exchanging ideas with others. By contrast, the Internet can be an active medium, allowing individuals to use e-mail, discussion groups, and even Web sites to engage with one another.

Cass Sunstein

If the prospect of a bad result gets the heart racing - a plane crash, a terrible disease, a loss of 30 percent of your portfolio - most people will take strong steps to avoid it. They will pay too little attention to a comforting thought, which is that worst-case scenarios usually don't come to fruition.

Cass Sunstein

They call soccer the beautiful game, but if I had to identify just one sport to show members of some alien species what the human race is all about, I'd nominate squash.

Cass Sunstein

Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms - the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault.

Cass Sunstein

Republicans are right to express concern about excessive regulation, and they can do a lot to reduce it, above all by scrutinizing rules on the books and by putting all new proposals through a cost-benefit filter. There's room for plenty of creativity here.

Cass Sunstein

In government, you're not a writer, you're an administrator.

Cass Sunstein

I think that every state in the union should recognize same-sex marriage.

Cass Sunstein

Web publishing can create common spaces; it all depends on how we, the readers and sometimes the producers, react to technological change. If we sort ourselves into narrow groups, common spaces will be in big trouble. But there's no reason not to have common spaces on the Internet. There are lots of them out there.

Cass Sunstein

Every human being has an assortment of diverse identities, and it greatly matters which one is triggered by social situations, which hold up different kinds of mirrors. The same is true for nations.

Cass Sunstein

Masterful politicians and effective agents of change tend to succeed by singling out and making salient some aspect of a nation's self-understanding, sparking a sense of recognition - and ultimately moving voters in their favor. Obama made it into an art form.

Cass Sunstein

Catholicism is a wide tent in terms of political and legal positions. We could have nine Catholics on the Supreme Court and a great deal of diversity toward the law.

Cass Sunstein

In a well-functioning democracy, people frequently encounter topics and points of view that they did not specifically select but from which they learn. Those encounters can change minds and, even, the course of lives.

Cass Sunstein

I confess I'm a big fan of Taylor Swift.

Cass Sunstein

Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can't take their own side in an argument.

Cass Sunstein

Most problems are best solved privately, not through government. There's a problem of discourtesy in the world, which is best handled through social norms, which are indispensable. But you wouldn't want the government to be mandating courtesy.

Cass Sunstein