“Heroism is a matter of choice.”
― Richard Cohen
“It has become increasingly difficult for states or the federal government to apply the death penalty. But why even try? Nothing is accomplished, and while the chances of making a mistake are now diminished – DNA can prove guilt as well as innocence – life in prison is a worthy substitute.”
― Richard Cohen
“We grow up to respect the gray. Black or white, one or the other, is childish. It represents the worldview of someone who does not know the world.”
― Richard Cohen
“We fear hackers lifting our digital wallet, a public accounting of our private lives, and we wonder if the shoes that follow us around the Internet will someday, with the click of a distant mouse, look like the jackboots of old.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump is unloved in his own house. A figure of ridicule, a theatrical creation, he is almost sympathetic. He was told by the greedy and the outright stupid that he would make a swell president. The Liar’s Paradox has spun out of control, with liars lying to a liar who believed the lie. What would that be called? Fox News, I think.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump was always a poster boy of the selfish, egomaniacal, ignorant, bragging, cruel rich kid, whose mirror was the sleazy pages of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘New York Post.’ Trump’s oxygen was the leaked item, without which he would die the suffocating death of being shown to a bad table.”
― Richard Cohen
“We are a segmented society, living in our individual bubbles.”
― Richard Cohen
“Our country undergoes periodic episodes of extreme intolerance and fear of foreigners, refugees in particular. Not only were people of Japanese descent placed in internment camps during World War II, but so were some Italians and Germans.”
― Richard Cohen
“The grieving are surely owed our empathy, but capital punishment can neither right a wrong nor prevent another from happening.”
― Richard Cohen
“Conservatives watch Fox News and read ‘Breitbart.’ Liberals watch MSNBC and read ‘HuffPost.’ When we agree, it’s the truth; when we differ, it’s fake news.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump is in the White House, fulminating on Twitter, messing up foreign policy, mistaking critics for enemies, refusing to immediately and unequivocally condemn neo-Nazis, racists, and other assorted goons – and, in general, failing to provide the nation with a scintilla of moral leadership. This will last until it can’t any longer.”
― Richard Cohen
“If every senator looks into the mirror and sees a future president, then every president looks into that same mirror and sees himself on Mount Rushmore.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump is a dust storm of lies and diversions with the bellows of a bully and the greasy ethics of a street-corner hustler.”
― Richard Cohen
“It is not true that Trump is nobody’s fool. He is the GOP’s.”
― Richard Cohen
“Pence is not a man to look a gift horse in the mouth. He’s got his eye on 2020.”
― Richard Cohen
“Evil comes in through the cable and through the Internet. We look forward to the advent of driverless cars. But they can be hacked. You could be riding along, and some 14-year-old in Romania takes over your car, so you end up running the lights and losing your brakes or, worse, listening to Eminem. What’s the purpose?”
― Richard Cohen
“My heroes are not necessarily people of great ability but ones who did what I think I could not.”
― Richard Cohen
“Since the end of World War II, American leadership has been essential to maintain world peace. Whether we liked it or not, we were the world’s policeman. There was no other cop on the beat. Now, that leadership is gone. So, increasingly, will be peace.”
― Richard Cohen
“The concept of cultural appropriation is nothing less than an intellectual fence: Keep out.”
― Richard Cohen
“Iran may or may not be the existential threat to Israel that Netanyahu insists it is. But a lessening of U.S. support for Israel certainly would be. With an indifferent America, Israel would become a lonely, frightening place.”
― Richard Cohen
“I am glad to see the Confederate battle flag gone from a place of honor at the South Carolina state capitol.”
― Richard Cohen
“I served in the Army. I worked at blue-collar jobs. I washed dishes and bused tables.”
― Richard Cohen
“Churchill had a marvelous way with words, and greatness accompanied him like a shadow, but in certain ways, he was a 19th-century man wandering, confounded, in the 20th.”
― Richard Cohen
“Polanski is a great film director – although the much-acclaimed ‘Chinatown’ has a muddled script – but his true talent is to make fools of his friends.”
― Richard Cohen
“It’s all right with me if Roman Polanski is freed by the Swiss authorities who have detained him at the request of the United States – if first I get a chance to bust him one in the mouth.”
― Richard Cohen
“Harvey Weinstein does not personify American liberalism any more than Bill O’Reilly personifies American conservatism.”
― Richard Cohen
“I don’t like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize.”
― Richard Cohen
“Every rippling muscle is a book not read, a movie not seen, or a conversation not held.”
― Richard Cohen
“Maybe the best example of the unmuscled hero is Humphrey Bogart in ‘Casablanca.’ Bogart was 15 years older than Ingrid Bergman, and it did not matter at all. He had the experience, the confidence, the internal strength that can only come with age.”
― Richard Cohen
“Republicans remain silent because Trump is doing what they want – lowering taxes on the rich, eviscerating regulations, bulldozing the environment, and insisting that a woman’s body is not her own.”
― Richard Cohen
“How is it possible to defame Trump? When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president a ‘moron,’ was that defamatory or merely the prosaic truth?”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump’s overriding accomplishment is plain: The Republican Party can no longer be shamed.”
― Richard Cohen
“I am not a German bitter-ender. I am, though, a German never-forgetter.”
― Richard Cohen
“In my several visits to Germany, I have written in admiration of that country’s strenuous efforts to face its past and make amends.”
― Richard Cohen
“Germany’s crimes were recent and of such a scale and depravity that, unless constantly faced, they will come to seem fictitious.”
― Richard Cohen
“Pence is the very personification of the career politician. With the exception of a few years doing talk radio and television shows, he has done nothing but run for office, winning all but the first two times.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump is a menace, both ignorant and chaotic. His saving grace is his incompetence.”
― Richard Cohen
“To anyone other than an adamant social conservative, Pence is shockingly unreasonable. But he is also shockingly hypocritical.”
― Richard Cohen
“The ultimate question is whether the name Donald Trump will be attached to an era – whether he will so change America that it will never be the same afterward.”
― Richard Cohen
“There is only so much chaos a nation can stand.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump critics such as myself have been accused of living in a bubble. On the contrary, it is Trump’s supporters in the 1 percent who breathed their own fumes.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump’s presidency will fail. Just don’t ask me how and when. It will collapse because at its center is a hollow man, lacking ballast, whose chaos cannot be contained.”
― Richard Cohen
“We need a national service that throws us all together, the urban with the rural, the Fox News types with the MSNBC crowd. That way, Americans can get to know Americans and learn – as previous generations did – that we are all Americans.”
― Richard Cohen
“Let me tell you, seven days without Wolf Blitzer is heaven. A week outside ‘The Situation Room’ is downright calming. No ‘breaking news!’ No hype. Blitzer is a first-class journalist, and I mention him only by way of acknowledging his fame.”
― Richard Cohen
“There was a time when an ordinary American could close the door and keep the world at bay. Now the world comes elbowing in every time you go online.”
― Richard Cohen
“Fox News has been a force in converting the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump. The network’s allegiance to Trump approaches mindless adoration.”
― Richard Cohen
“George W. Bush, a charming and utterly gracious man, was a catastrophic twofer. He took the United States to war in Iraq, a wrenching debacle: more than 4,000 Americans dead, nearly 32,000 wounded, and the Middle East destabilized with Iranian influence enhanced.”
― Richard Cohen
“When I was a kid, I went door to door in my neighborhood asking for donations to the Jewish National Fund, best known then for its Israel forestation program. At the age of 11 or so, I imagined myself a regular Johnny Appleseed, responsible for vast forests.”
― Richard Cohen
“As we see with Sunni and Shiite Muslims, interreligious fights are the most ugly.”
― Richard Cohen
“In order to take a nation to war, you have to believe mightily in the threat you are facing and the virtue of your cause.”
― Richard Cohen
“If you told me back in my Army days that I could have bought the same weapon that I had been using in training, I would not have believed it.”
― Richard Cohen
“The NRA has led the way in the mainstreaming of a demented gun ideology.”
― Richard Cohen
“What’s the justification for a semiautomatic weapon with a magazine of 30 rounds?”
― Richard Cohen
“Leaving aside handguns and hunting weapons, what’s the justification for possessing an AR-15-style weapon?”
― Richard Cohen
“With a sinking feeling, I have come to a horrible conclusion: I am addicted to Donald Trump.”
― Richard Cohen
“You have to admit that Trump is endlessly creative. He has insulted the disabled, the dead, the parents of the dead, women, Mexicans, Muslims, Asians, African Americans, former POWs, the media and, to get just a bit more specific, ‘The Post.’”
― Richard Cohen
“I long ago tired of politicians who never say anything, adhere to their talking points, and avoid all controversy.”
― Richard Cohen
“It has become commonplace to call Trump a reality TV star. That is said as an aspersion, the way Ronald Reagan was called an actor. But Reagan’s acting experience, his ability to talk to the camera and not yell to the hall, is what helped make him such a good politician. It is the same with Trump.”
― Richard Cohen
“What if Hillary Clinton were a man? What if she were a 68-year-old man rather than a 68-year-old woman? Would we think differently of her?”
― Richard Cohen
“I met Clinton during her husband’s first campaign for the White House. It was 1992, New Hampshire, and both Clintons had stopped at a coffee shop to greet the folks and get something to eat.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump’s juvenilia stands in stark contrast to Obama’s measured words.”
― Richard Cohen
“I don’t know if history will adjudge Barack Obama a great president, but he has been a necessary one.”
― Richard Cohen
“Something about the Clintons sets the GOP to howling at the moon.”
― Richard Cohen
“Travelgate eventually faded, and the nation somehow survived – American exceptionalism at work again.”
― Richard Cohen
“Hillary Clinton may have lied about her emails, but Donald Trump lies about everything.”
― Richard Cohen
“Most men, I think, wonder about their courage. How would they act in combat? Under torture?”
― Richard Cohen
“As a presidential candidate, Trump seems heaven-sent just to make fools out of Republicans.”
― Richard Cohen
“Say what you will about Donald Trump, he cares. He cares about things I don’t, and he has some awful ideas, and he is an amoral man in so many ways. But, in contrast to Obama, his emotions are no mystery.”
― Richard Cohen
“Being an American is life-threatening. For various reasons, men and women here don’t live as long as men and women in about two dozen other countries, including the ones we defeated in World War II – Japan, Germany and Italy.”
― Richard Cohen
“Republicans and others who are in anguish over the possibility of socialized medicine ought to have to explain their ideology to a mother with a sick newborn. They ought to have to explain how this nation can debate health care and not mention how abysmal ours is.”
― Richard Cohen
“Lots of men have failed as presidents, as Trump surely will, but few fail so dismally as role models. He’s a boy’s idea of a man. He’s a man’s idea of a boy.”
― Richard Cohen
“Myths have a certain staying power because, really, they are aspirational – not always who we are, but always who we want to be. We see ourselves as good and generous. We believe we are a virtuous nation.”
― Richard Cohen
“As a kid, I was a paperboy, and the walls of the place where we picked up our papers were plastered with pictures of former paperboys – some sports figures, some presidents, some military officers.”
― Richard Cohen
“Raising money, like sausage-making, ain’t pretty to see, and it would be just criminally naive to rely on the big hearts of big donors.”
― Richard Cohen
“There is precious little that’s charitable about the world of charity.”
― Richard Cohen
“I reveled in political science and history of all kinds, and I felt for a long time that I had discovered all the secrets of life in psychology, although its Freudian variety left me cold. The id never made much sense to me.”
― Richard Cohen
“I value my education, but I cannot put a value on it. I know it has been worth some money to me – I don’t think ‘The Post’ would have hired me if I had lacked a degree – but I probably could have earned about the same if I had stayed in the insurance business, where I worked while going to college at night.”
― Richard Cohen
“I came of age when jobs were plentiful and college not exorbitantly expensive. I graduated with debt, but it was manageable, and I set off to do something I loved – journalism.”
― Richard Cohen
“I never went to college to make money.”
― Richard Cohen
“Hillary Clinton looms over the Democratic Party like Evita from her balcony.”
― Richard Cohen
“The term ‘disrupter’ has become an accolade, like first-responder or something.”
― Richard Cohen
“The more Scott Walker campaigns, the more he proves he is not intellectually fit for the office he’s seeking. He asserts innocent ignorance on matters he should by now know something about – a way of masking his apparent bigotry.”
― Richard Cohen
“Israel may be beloved, but for American security, it is not essential.”
― Richard Cohen
“In power politics, it’s usually not enough to be liked. A nation has to be considered essential.”
― Richard Cohen
“The fact is that the United States does not need Israel. Our special relationship was not forged, as it was with Great Britain, in two world wars, not to mention a common language and, in significant respects, culture. It is based on warmth, emotion, shared values – and, not to be dismissed, a potent domestic lobby.”
― Richard Cohen
“The ability and willingness to keep two opposing views in mind at the same time are hallmarks of adulthood.”
― Richard Cohen
“I have come to the conclusion that Ben Carson is a bit nuts. I say that not because I disagree with him politically, but because he doesn’t seem to know what the truth is.”
― Richard Cohen
“Trump lies when confronted with the truth, since any crack in his narcissism might spread like an Ebola of the soul, and he would deflate like one of Macy’s balloons on the Friday after Thanksgiving.”
― Richard Cohen
“My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the ‘elite.’ If so, I damned well earned it.”
― Richard Cohen
“Among the things I know is that Trump voters were played for suckers.”
― Richard Cohen
“I have written about cultural dislocation, and I understand the corrosive effect of diminished expectations.”
― Richard Cohen
“A presidential candidate needs a slogan.”
― Richard Cohen
“Sometimes I think that Rush Limbaugh is the dumbest man in America. This happens whenever I take him at face value and forget that he is basically an entertainer with contempt for his audience. He will tell them anything.”
― Richard Cohen
“I agree that sometimes Michelle Obama can come across as angry – and anger is discomforting. We venerate that empty word, closure, wanting to seal off the pain of the past and refusing it admittance to the chirpy present. This, of course, is nonsense.”
― Richard Cohen
“It takes a willful disregard of history to appreciate how white Southerners could look at the Confederate battle flag and see states’ rights or a way of life or a tradition – and not one human being whipping another, which was a common occurrence.”
― Richard Cohen
“Opposition to social change is but one pillar of contemporary Republicanism.”
― Richard Cohen
“Large government is inevitably inefficient, but so, too, is large private enterprise.”
― Richard Cohen
“Much worse than the unavoidable inefficiencies of large government is the failure to fund the government we need.”
― Richard Cohen
“Private enterprise cannot rebuild the nation’s infrastructure or keep our research institutions vibrant. Government must do what only it can do.”
― Richard Cohen
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