More and more people support equality for their gay friends and neighbors, and that is not because the 'Duck Dynasty' guy almost lost his show.Collection: Equality
Whenever you're talking about using humor in politics or in a policy speech or in a serious moment, you're talking about using it as a tool to engage people. That's why putting a joke in a political speech is a luxury, and it is always a risk.Collection: Humor
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That's what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential and aware of your inexperience.Collection: Intelligence
I'm motivated by a bottomless well of anger. It's a joke, but I don't think I don't mean it.Collection: Anger
Every technology company should have a red button somewhere in the headquarters where, if they realize they've caused more societal harm than they expected and done more harm than good, they press the button, and the company dissolves instantly.
Washington is filled with people making other people's arguments for money.
Life tests our willingness, in ways large and small, to tell the truth.
Sometimes you're going to be inexperienced, naive, untested, and totally right. And then, in those moments, you have to make a choice: is this a time to speak up, or hang back?
I'll always cringe remembering those little embarrassing moments when I said something dumb on a conference call, when my inexperience poked through, when I should have been more solicitous of the judgment of those around me. They're a reminder that it's not mutually exclusive to be confident and humble, to be skeptical and eager to learn.
I worked on one speech about the financial system that caused the Dow to drop, like, 200 points.
When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber, and he used to be black, but he made himself white, and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Wacko Jacko.
One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world.
America needs a strong, rational, positive, practical conservative movement. It needs that bulwark against liberal delusion and hubris. It needs a voice that says we are imperfect, that life is complex, that government can create need even as it meets need, that you can't fix everything, and freedom is worth some danger and sorrow.
The Internet didn't cause Donald Trump, and it certainly can't solve Donald Trump.
We are drowning in information.
We don't want people to be afraid of saying something interesting on the off chance it's taken the wrong way.
The First Amendment's protections have always put a great deal of responsibility in our hands: not only to respect the power of our own speech, but also to respect that same power in the hands of people we despise.
A boring speech can be just a boring speech. But a speech with a joke that falls flat is awful. I hate it. That's why I think it's easier to hate a comedy. If a drama doesn't land, it's boring; if a joke doesn't land - you hate that.
When a joke works, it works. It can make a point in a really simple way; it can be a great little sound bite to put on television or share on social media. Humor has this incredible power in how we communicate about politics now, in part because there's something natural in the way it's communicated.
Kellyanne Conway is one of the most dishonest humans ever to grace the office she holds.
Part of my job as a presidential speechwriter (along with great writers like Jon Favreau and David Axelrod) was finding that sliver where 'presidential' and 'actually funny' overlap.
Everybody hates Congress; even Congress hates Congress.
Humor connects us, especially in politics. It's a way of surprising one another with shared context and experience.
When in doubt, mock the powerful, not the powerless.
A great speech can make you remember something about what you believe, about who you are, about who you want to be. It's rare when that kind of thing happens. But it is important, and it is real.
Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it's convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.
Because the speech is an argument, and a great speech makes an argument well, the act of making that argument is a really important part of how the policy process coalesces and solidifies both for the candidate and also the people serving that candidate.
There is that definition of leadership that says, 'Leadership is convincing people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have done because you've made them believe it's the right thing to do.' And a great speech can do that.
Republicans paint everything that Democrats have been for as socialism, too far to the left, as extreme, and it didn't matter how moderated it was; it didn't matter that Obamacare started out as a compromise. You might as well say what you're actually for and show what you really are.
If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news, it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.
I had a really fun career in TV right after I left politics.
The conversation on Twitter and the way people are in the world are very different.
There are a lot of heartbroken, anxious people that thought better of their country. We're heartbroken by how far Trump has gotten to the most powerful position in the world.
Trump is a raptor testing the fences, and he found weaknesses to escape and try things that would work, every single day.
I am a deeply awkward person; I am not cool.
It's so unfair that Barack Obama, this cool, charming guy, also has good comedic timing.
We need to stop telling each other to shut up. We need to get comfortable with the reality that no one is going to shut up.
I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.
People say that making money in the content-media game is hard, and that is just, like, not my experience. It's super-confusing, 'cause everyone's like, 'Oh, how are you going to monetize?' It's easy: just start talking, and then money rolls in.
You look at what animates Democratic voters; you look at what animates Democratic politicians: it's health care. It's increasingly climate. It is wages and economic issues. It's issues around reproductive freedom and criminal justice reform and inequality.
I am very glad that Paul Ryan left the government as a capitulating supplicant to Donald Trump while the government was shut down, while the debt hit record levels, right? Every single thing Paul Ryan claimed to care about.
We've been dealing with censorship around multimedia, about multinational companies and the content they create, for a very long time.
I'm famously humble.
Making '1600 Penn' was really fun, and I learned a lot.
I'm not insulting Trump supporters; I'm calling the people that CNN puts on television terrible representatives of the views of conservatives.
So often on CNN, there's a world-class journalist interviewing campaign rejects and ideologues and silly, craven people who do not care about informing people, that aren't there to help people understand what's going on in the news.
'Pod Save America' will be a kingmaker.
One of the lessons of 2016 is to spend less time worrying about what will happen and more time worrying about what we want to happen.
One thing that is for certain is that there are tens of millions of people who are deeply unsatisfied with the way they get their political news.
Little things had to go wrong for Donald Trump to become president: Comey, emails, all that stuff. Big things did make Trump possible. Big, cultural, political, economic forces opened the door to someone like Trump.