Norah Vincent Quotes

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Norah Vincent

Profession : Writer

Birth : September 20, 1968

In fact, Obama's intellectual curiosity and suppleness of mind is, in my view, one of his biggest selling points, whatever your political beliefs.

Norah Vincent

For far too long, the abortion debate has been about political advocacy, not ideas.

Norah Vincent

The feminist establishment has made choice a woman's issue. The Christian right has made life a religious issue. Both have made loyalty crucial. If you're pro-woman, you're pro-choice. If you're pro-God, you're pro-life. But this is a false dichotomy.

Norah Vincent

Abortion is not a feminist issue, and it is not a religious issue. It's a libertarian issue that, legally speaking, has nothing to do with women's bodies or God and everything to do with the Constitution.

Norah Vincent

Fetal humanity is the philosophical hinge on which the abortion debate turns.

Norah Vincent

If the world ended tomorrow and good and evil fought it out for keeps, I imagine that David Brock would be one of the devil's chief recruits.

Norah Vincent

The candidates who get themselves elected are illusionists and prevaricators of the first order. We expect this of them. They're a reflection of us, and they won't get any nobler until we do.

Norah Vincent

People are selfish. What's more, they aren't, for the most part, very interested in ideals. They're interested in themselves, not the truth or the good.

Norah Vincent

The eternal question of U.S. politics is the whiny 'what have you done for me lately?' rather than the more incisive and high-minded 'are you honest?' That query simply isn't on the application.

Norah Vincent

You've got to lie skillfully to get elected, because you've got to convince a whole zoo of self-involved ciphers that you've got every one of their self-serving, solipsistic interests at heart.

Norah Vincent

Feminism is not monolithic and never will be if it remains true to its founding principle that a woman has a mind of her own and the right to express it freely.

Norah Vincent

Growing up in England in the late 1970s and the '80s when my father was working at the European headquarters of Ford Motor Co., I was derisively called a Yank on a daily basis and told in unprintably explicit terms to go back to my own country.

Norah Vincent

Nobody likes to be lectured.

Norah Vincent

Secondhand smoke is toxic to bystanders.

Norah Vincent

Being free doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want; that's license. It also doesn't mean that you don't have to pay up when whatever you've insisted is your right to do turns sour in the doing.

Norah Vincent

Smokers, like so many of us, are mavericks when they're healthy but parasites when they're not. They trash their bodies and then expect the rest of us to pick up the pieces, as well as most of the tab for the damage they've so defiantly done to themselves.

Norah Vincent

There are at least two circumstances under which journalists have both a right and an obligation to publish details about a public person's private life: first, if the behaviors or events in question are illegal or immoral; and second, if it can be shown that the subject lied publicly about them.

Norah Vincent

It should go without saying, of course, that anything a journalist writes about any person, public or private, must have a verifiable basis in fact.

Norah Vincent

Conservatives do not oppose affirmative action because they are crypto-racists.

Norah Vincent

War alone, however anathema it may seem on principle to the pacifist contingent, can secure a reprieve for the tortured Iraqi people and is therefore justifiable in humanitarian terms.

Norah Vincent