Eugene Jarecki Quotes

#1. The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.

Eugene Jarecki

#2. Reagan is held up to us as an example of never raising taxes. Correction: Reagan raised taxes six of his eight years as president. Why? He was a pragmatist, not doctrinaire. He saw problems emerging, and when his policies faltered he changed his views. Flexibility, not rigidity.

Eugene Jarecki

#3. I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.

Eugene Jarecki

#4. The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn't do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.

Eugene Jarecki

#5. You can't have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.

Eugene Jarecki

#6. His track record of pragmatism, depth and candor all speak to a person who would find the Tea Party simplistic, opportunistic and misguided. Reagan was surrounded by some very smart people who gave him very sound advice. They were not wondering where certain countries are on the map.

Eugene Jarecki

#7. Ronald Reagan felt very great regret about the deficits to which he contributed on his watch.

Eugene Jarecki

#8. As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

Eugene Jarecki

#9. To say that Reagan teaches us that we should be against amnesty for illegal immigrants is to contradict what Reagan himself stood for - that he was in favor of amnesty.

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#10. You can call me an Eisenhower Republican. There is a gigantic gulf between an Eisenhower Republican and the kind of fringe brand of Republicanism that is being so vocally promoted today.

Eugene Jarecki

#11. Reagan himself, for much of his life, was devoted against the elites. His antagonism to the Soviet Union is antagonism against oppression by the elites of the many.

Eugene Jarecki

#12. Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.

Eugene Jarecki

#13. My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.

Eugene Jarecki

#14. The prison industrial complex is perhaps, at least domestically, the most striking example of us putting profit before people. It all stems from one basic misunderstanding: that the public good can be shepherded by private interests.

Eugene Jarecki

#15. The whole idea of a democracy is that we ourselves, the people, are supposed to make a path of our politics, and it is we who with our feet and our vote and our labors and our vigilance are supposed to shape our country.

Eugene Jarecki

#16. I have criticisms of Ronald Reagan, but he lives in another universe from the kind of political theater that is represented by people, like Sarah Palin, who aren't really public servants.

Eugene Jarecki

#17. War is party-blind. It doesn't care who is in the Oval Office. The forces that drive us to war don't care whether it's Republican, Democrat, or other. The fact is, these parties are prey to special interests. That is something Eisenhower was afraid of.

Eugene Jarecki

#18. What was happening was the war on drugs. That was the primary culprit I could see that was getting in the way of black progress.

Eugene Jarecki

#19. It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.

Eugene Jarecki

#20. We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

Eugene Jarecki

#21. If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.

Eugene Jarecki

#22. Reagan has very significant things to teach us - positive lessons and quite negative lessons.

Eugene Jarecki

#23. It was widespread that the politics of Tea Party people would be foreign to Ronald Reagan and they would be seen by him as frivolous and uninformed.

Eugene Jarecki

#24. Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mama's boy and he said no, more of a papa's boy. At the same time he was willing to say that his father had many shortcomings and needed to be held accountable.

Eugene Jarecki

#25. Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He's not the simple, folksy figure that he's often portrayed as.

Eugene Jarecki

#26. There are people who are trying to advance themselves by wrapping themselves in Reagan.

Eugene Jarecki

#27. I don't think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don't think he's primarily marvelous; he's complicated.

Eugene Jarecki

#28. It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

Eugene Jarecki