“In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.” — Kurt Andersen Cult Copy Share Image
“it will require a struggle to try to make America reality-based again.” — Kurt Andersen America Copy Share Image
“The antisharia movement lobbied states to pass statutes and constitutional amendments banning the use of sharia in their courts and legal systems,… — Kurt Andersen Israel Copy Share Image
“Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“But what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many… — Kurt Andersen America Copy Share Image
I am proud to be American. We wouldn't have our big dreams without this quality, but if we can't agree on the… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism… — Kurt Andersen Printing press Copy Share Image
“In 1848 the Homeopathic Medical College was founded in Philadelphia, eventually becoming the Drexel University College of Medicine. Homeopathic M.D. degrees were… — Kurt Andersen Doctor Copy Share Image
“Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” —PHILIP K. DICK” — Kurt Andersen Realities Copy Share Image
“Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania… — Kurt Andersen Irrational Copy Share Image
“The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay… — Kurt Andersen Colony Copy Share Image
“the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,”… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“EVEN PAUL GOODMAN, beloved by young leftists in the 1960s, was flabbergasted by his students in 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he… — Kurt Andersen Education Copy Share Image
“The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions.… — Kurt Andersen Carbon emissions Copy Share Image
“Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine instructed, basically, Don’t be stupid. “Shall we say, then,” he wrote about Genesis, “there was such… — Kurt Andersen Creation Copy Share Image
“Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists had reveled in their sense of persecution by an infidel elite, but in the… — Kurt Andersen Fundamentalists Copy Share Image
“One of the patients at Kellogg’s Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium was C. W. Post, who got the idea there for Grape Nuts, which… — Kurt Andersen Health benefits Copy Share Image
“For Northerners, victory had confirmed they were on God’s side, fortifying their besetting smugness, and their religion resolved more and more into… — Kurt Andersen Religion Copy Share Image
“After more than three decades and many hundreds of studies, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GMO foods are safe to eat.… — Kurt Andersen Climate change Copy Share Image
“If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or… — Kurt Andersen Fantasy Copy Share Image
“It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative… — Kurt Andersen Freedom Copy Share Image
“The great compromise between the American religious impulse and the American Enlightenment in the 1700s permitted any and every conceivable sect to… — Kurt Andersen Enlightenment Copy Share Image
“And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the… — Kurt Andersen Psychology Copy Share Image
“it was the sudden, shocking exposure of actual conspiracies starting in the 1970s that made Americans overcorrect, to assume that anything bad… — Kurt Andersen Conspiracies Copy Share Image
“Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S.… — Kurt Andersen Climate change Copy Share Image
“YOU KNOW HOW young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it?… — Kurt Andersen Change Copy Share Image
“We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it… — Kurt Andersen Truth Copy Share Image
“If underground militant cells were setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks around the country these days, of course, America would… — Kurt Andersen Martial law Copy Share Image
“P. T. Barnum was the great early American merchandiser of exciting secular fantasies and half-truths. His extremely successful precircus career derived from… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“The Middle Ages are generally reckoned to have ended at least a century before America’s founding. By the 1620s in the Old… — Kurt Andersen Bible Copy Share Image
“With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions… — Kurt Andersen Freedom Copy Share Image
“The new king of the Protestant Establishment, featured on the cover of Time, was Reinhold Niebuhr, a New Yorker and bona-fide intellectual… — Kurt Andersen Eternal life Copy Share Image
“Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a… — Kurt Andersen Protestantism Copy Share Image
“IN 1967 YOUNG Tom Stoppard had his breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a brilliant play about actors playing characters playing… — Kurt Andersen Fiction and reality Copy Share Image
“Each side was sincerely convinced that it was carrying out God’s orders. In the North and the South, soldiers and ministers and… — Kurt Andersen War Copy Share Image
“We can argue all we want about how different guns were in the 1790s, when it took a minute to fire three… — Kurt Andersen Amendment Copy Share Image
“mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries;… — Kurt Andersen Business Copy Share Image
“The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press…did not foresee…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the… — Kurt Andersen Brave new world Copy Share Image
Maybe the reality-based fractions of red and blue America are reaching a sort of consensus: Just as Republicans are beginning to get… — Kurt Andersen America Copy Share Image
