Selected Wendy Kaminer Quotations
• Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.
• My notions of justice require that we treat people as individuals and that we don't use sex as a predictor of character or behavior any more than we use race.
• A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
• When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.
• I'm better at criticism than social engineering, so I always have a hard time answering good practical questions like "what can the average person do?"
• I've always felt that my part of the job was to analyze and criticize in the hope that other people might use my work to forge solutions.
• Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice -- a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.
• [On the self-help movement] What were once billed as bad habits and dilemmas ... are now considered addictions, or reaction to the addictions of others, or both.
• Jargon seems to be the place where the right brain and the left brain meet.
• The more limited your understanding of science, the more that scientists resemble masters of the occult, and the more that paranormal phenomena seem likely to reflect undiscovered scientific truths.
• Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best -- monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.
• It's naive to expect partisan politicians to play fair, I know; still, I'm always surprised by the boldness of their hypocrisies.
• ... alleged moral exemplars, from presidents to popes, along with lesser beings (the rest of us) tell lies in the belief that they serve a greater good. Lies are often imbued with transcendent instrumental value by the individuals and institutions that utter them. Sometimes the lies are self-serving, of course, but the tendency -- or temptation -- to lie in service of justice makes it virtually impossible to condemn all lying categorically.
• To rationalize their lies, people -- and the governments, churches, or terrorist cells they compose -- are apt to regard their private interests and desires as just.
• Liars -- especially liars in power -- often conflate their interest with the public interest.
• Why do writers and artists create? Their reasons vary, of course. I write partly out of an irresistible impulse to hold forth -- for the sheer pleasure of expressing and communicating ideas -- partly for the satisfaction of being credited and recognized for my work, partly to persuade people, and partly to provoke public conversations and consideration of ideas. I'm frustrated when readers misinterpret my work and invigorated when they interpret it unpredictably. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I suspect that my work would survive if my copyrights died with me.
• But if the fallacy underlying much conservative opposition to sexual or racial preferences is the assumption that without them life would be a meritocracy, liberal advocacy of affirmative action often reflects another fallacy: the assumption that the use of group preferences is cost-free and that the socially desirable goal of racial and ethnic diversity can be met without harming individuals or violating fundamental liberties.
• When the government seeks to expand its power to spy on us, it should be required to show how the loss of anonymity and freedom will make us safer.
• Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack (on the World Trade Center and Pentagon), we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.
• The hunger for leadership in times of crisis is always unsettling and afflicts nearly everyone.
• Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least.
• Democracy is not for Utopians.
• As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.
• My own notion of intimacy does not include prurience – the exchange of secrets between strangers. My vision of community is shaped by an ideal of mutual respect between citizens and neighbors and a shared sense of courtesy and justice, but not love.
