Kurt Andersen

Once a decade, once every eight years, Donald Trump finds some pretext to say I suck and that I'm bad.

— Kurt Andersen

I often set two alarm clocks because I'm afraid the first one won't actually make me get up.

— Kurt Andersen

“No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press,”

— Kurt Andersen

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

— Kurt Andersen

The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition.

— Kurt Andersen

“If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me…

— Kurt Andersen

TED was simply wonderful, an intellectual spa, a 21st-century Chataqua, superb and singular.

— Kurt Andersen

I think we tend to be kind of ahistorical, and think that life as we are living it in the moment is…

— Kurt Andersen

“When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”

— Kurt Andersen

“A MAIN ARGUMENT of this book concerns how so many parts of American life have morphed into forms of entertainment. From 1980…

— Kurt Andersen

“Neither side has been aware of it, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been wearing different…

— Kurt Andersen

“The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.”

— Kurt Andersen

“Acknowledging actual, specific conspiracies makes sense. But reflexive conspiracism can become a bad habit and a misguided way of making sense of…

— Kurt Andersen

Anything remotely resembling news media is going to continue to migrate online until very little or none of it is produced on…

— Kurt Andersen

“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the…

— Kurt Andersen

“the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of…

— Kurt Andersen

Because we don't know that much about what has happened before, it's useful. But either we will recover and progress, or the…

— Kurt Andersen

“Let me quote once more from Tolkien’s lecture, which he delivered a few months before the fantasy-besotted Nazis started World War II.…

— Kurt Andersen

“As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to…

— Kurt Andersen

“The consequence of such mingling is that an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized…

— Kurt Andersen

“J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. “Fantasy,” he said in 1939, talking…

— Kurt Andersen

I'm comparing Americans to international peers in terms of GDP, educational system - the sort of benchmarks we used to designate a…

— Kurt Andersen

“THE BIG PIECE of secular conventional wisdom about Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work…

— Kurt Andersen

“The Beats’ self-conception descended from a particular American lineage—mountain men, outlaws, frontier cranks, lonely individualists, and narcissistic outsiders sounding their barbaric yawps…

— Kurt Andersen

“The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” says the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016.…

— Kurt Andersen

“As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During…

— Kurt Andersen

“As he recalled the fervor years later, “by means of systematized effort, large numbers of people of all ages, but especially the…

— Kurt Andersen

“Wallowing in nostalgia for a lost Golden Age ruined by meddling liberal outsiders from Washington and New York, previously a white Southern…

— Kurt Andersen

“A kind of unspoken grand bargain was forged between the anti-Establishment and the Establishment. Going forward, individuals would be permitted as never…

— Kurt Andersen

“Whether an individual’s conspiracism exists alongside religious faith, psychologically they’re similar: a conspiracy theory can be revised and refined and further confirmed,…

— Kurt Andersen

“So now they would go all the way. Ferociously believing every miracle and myth in an ancient text wasn’t enough. They were…

— Kurt Andersen

“Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the left manage to remain more or less in charge of their followers, while…

— Kurt Andersen

“Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that…

— Kurt Andersen

“JONES IS BOTH symptom and cause of how knee-jerk, florid conspiracism has become rampant and normalized in America, a fixture of the…

— Kurt Andersen

“IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of…

— Kurt Andersen

“Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside but grew and thrived—and came to seem…

— Kurt Andersen

“major argument of this book is that Americans are not just exceptionally religious but that our dominant religion has become exceptionally literal…

— Kurt Andersen

“Europeans had highly developed regional and national cultures and societies before they bolted on Protestantism. America, on the other hand, was half-created…

— Kurt Andersen

“Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that…

— Kurt Andersen

“Sharia law uses the sacred texts of Islam as the basis for moral behavior, the way Jews are supposed to use the…

— Kurt Andersen