Paul Graham:

If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige.

Sam Nunn:

The president's vision was a significant change in direction. But the process has preserved the status quo.

Jim Jarmusch:

I am suspicious of all politicians, especially those who get elected.

Counterfactual Obama:

Pretty much everything my best people have come up with only makes things worse.

Dr. Seuss:

I said, "I do not fear those pants
With nobody inside them."
I said, and said, and said those words.
I said them. But I lied them.

Thomas Wells:

We choose a government on the basis of our understanding of our interests and values, but then the government shapes our understanding in turn.

James R. Gaines:

The sense of aggrievement is comprehensive, bipartisan, somewhat incoherent, but deeply felt. This should be more than disconcerting; it's a situation that could get dangerous. As the Princeton political scientist Mark Beissinger has shown, separatist movements can take hold around contempt for incumbents and the status quo even when protesters have no ideology in common.

Anthony Painter:

We are living in intensely political times. And it is a moment in which mainstream politics will be under intense scrutiny and even threat. Embedded elites do not like that as a notion; dismissal is the simplest response.

The modern state is designed around competing elites who are insiders in the system. The electoral system maintains this duopoly. Around this elite contest, a media is constructed and organised, party organisations exist to manufacture majorities to serve it. This system is replicated over time. The state, the party system, the media are all tied together in an enduring status quo.

The stark reality of modern democratic life in western societies is that we are going to see some surprising extinctions. We are in existential territory.