Jane Mayer Quotes

#1. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. - Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States (1928)

Jane Mayer

#2. By 2009, [Richard] DeVos's son, Dick and daughter-in-law Betsy were major donors on the Koch lust and facing a $5.2 million civil fine of their own for violating Ohio's campaign-finance laws.

Jane Mayer

#3. There is nothing in our constitutional democracy that accepts that two of the richest people in the world can control our destiny.

Jane Mayer

#4. And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.

Jane Mayer

#5. Now that he has disavowed as outright lies many of the stories he told himself, it's hard to know what to make of those who still insist that David Brock had it right the first time.

Jane Mayer

#6. I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark.

Jane Mayer

#7. Fink, boasted to The Wichita Eagle in 2012, "I think that's actually one of the things that happened at the Obama administration, is that every rock they overturned, they saw people who were against it, and it turned out to be us.

Jane Mayer

#8. normal condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation; as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in body and mind.

Jane Mayer

#9. Libertarianism is supposed to be all about principles, but what it's really about is political expedience. It's basically a corporate front, masked as a philosophy.

Jane Mayer

#10. Well, they are critics of the Bush administration generally on the human rights record of the administration, and in particular, they are very, very critical of this use of science.

Jane Mayer

#11. I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they're all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.

Jane Mayer

#12. change, had been a featured guest at a fund-raiser that David Koch hosted for about seventy of the

Jane Mayer

#13. And I think that what is of concern is that they seem to be bringing skills from the scientific world into the interrogation room in a way that begs a lot of questions about whether it's ethical.

Jane Mayer

#14. The world's a small place and people are watching; and, you know, somebody disappears, the family knows and their colleagues know, and so eventually, these things do get out.

Jane Mayer

#15. [David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into it.

Jane Mayer

#16. What these memos do is they make legal acts that were criminal prior to these memos.

Jane Mayer

#17. In contrast, for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million, completely dwarfing the scale of money that was considered deeply corrupt during the Watergate days.

Jane Mayer

#18. We've seen Second Amendment enthusiasts take action against abortion doctors. There's an attempt to paint us as villains in the same way.

Jane Mayer

#19. What worries me," he adds, "is that this circus-like atmosphere may have scared off many young scientists. It actually has a chilling effect. It prevents scientists from participating in the public discourse, because they fear they, or their department head, will be threatened.

Jane Mayer

#20. These new groups would act as the privatized auxiliary force Rove had been dreaming of for years. Rove told the moneymen, "People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we're really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy. Now," he emphasized, "it's time to get serious.

Jane Mayer

#21. Torture is illegal, both in the U.S. and abroad. So - and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration.

Jane Mayer

#22. But there have been many news reports that water-boarding has been used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the major al Qaeda figures that we have in U.S. custody.

Jane Mayer

#23. The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.

Jane Mayer

#24. Ethically, I think pretty much every code of ethics for doctors suggests that they should not be in an interrogation room, particularly if there's anything coercive or abusive going on.

Jane Mayer

#25. for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million, completely dwarfing the scale of money that was considered deeply corrupt during the Watergate days. The

Jane Mayer

#26. Direct rule by the superrich invites a dangerous amount of scrutiny.

Jane Mayer

#27. It was our view of the worst that could befall our people if they were taken captive. So, what was fascinating to me was that somehow it appears the techniques that we have feared most in the world would be used on our people, we are using on people in our custody.

Jane Mayer

#28. Winkler-Koch benefited directly from this project, which was designed to help enable the fuel policy of the Third Reich.

Jane Mayer

#29. Opponents of climate change reform got their wish. "Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has, because that's all you really want," Morano later acknowledged. "There's no legislation we're championing. We're the negative force. We are just trying to stop stuff.

Jane Mayer

#30. The idea is that if we can put our own people through something almost as bad as what they might have to go through if they were taken captive, they will inoculate themselves.

Jane Mayer

#31. So, it, of course, makes one wonder how many other people there might be who are completely innocent, who have been sent by the U.S. to countries where they've been interrogated, and in some instances it seems tortured.

Jane Mayer

#32. Well, yes, I mean, I think that, you know, my sources suggest that there's a lot of support for the notion that there is a lot of Koran abuse and that it was very much a systematic design, not just an aberration.

Jane Mayer

#33. And, in fact, there is a connection, the people who designed this here program and who implement it are the same people who are overseeing and helping in the interrogations of detainees in places like Guantanamo.

Jane Mayer

#34. And the program was developed in large part by behavioral scientists who were working with the military, who do everything they possibly can to measure a soldier's stress levels to see how they're doing physically and emotionally, as they go through this program.

Jane Mayer