I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.

Andrew Sullivan

Categorized in : Space Iraq Middle East

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.

Andrew Sullivan

usa political president

In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes.

Andrew Sullivan

academia skills talking

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Andrew Sullivan

alive writing sports

I think there were two great gay Americans obviously, and that was Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.

Andrew Sullivan

gay two thinking

Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques is true?

Andrew Sullivan

gains historical enemy

The important things are not worth knowing because they are useful. They are worth knowing because they are true.

Andrew Sullivan

important-things important knowing

Homophobia: the fear that another man will treat you like you treat women.

Andrew Sullivan

homosexuality like-you men

Not many people sleep with other men and when the other man leaves have a nervous breakdown.

Andrew Sullivan

sleep men people

Don't fool yourself that you're blogging when you're really just putting stuff up online.

Andrew Sullivan

blogging fool stuff

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

Andrew Sullivan

political religious order

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

Andrew Sullivan

political ideology religion

I think essentially corrupting institutions in Washington are turning conservatism into something that is really very creepy, but also emotionally and psychically powerful for people.

Andrew Sullivan

powerful people thinking

A mind is a wonderful thing to change.

Andrew Sullivan

wonderful-things mind wonderful

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

Andrew Sullivan

pain struggle believe

Homosexuality is like the weather. It just is.

Andrew Sullivan

homosexuality gay weather

You just have to keep going. I mean I think our job, my job, is to keep articulating that I exist and that there are lots of people like me exist and we just have no home.

Andrew Sullivan

home jobs mean

Leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views raises the specter of domestic repression. But in a country with a First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly overrepresented.

Andrew Sullivan

government views country

The day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It's coming for the anti-war movement.

Andrew Sullivan

hussein movement war

Personally, I'd rather have pins stuck in my eyes than endure a conversation with John Kerry, but I'd love to hang with Bush.

Andrew Sullivan

politics eye conversation

I've never been a partisan, I've never been a Republican, I've never been a Democrat, ever, which is why I was very frustrated being called a gay Republican when I never attached myself to that.

Andrew Sullivan

frustrated republican gay