Quotes from Geoffrey Nunberg

Still, to paraphrase what John Stuart Mill said about the stupidity of the Tories, while not all people who claim to be politically incorrect are assholes, it's exactly the sort of thing an asshole is apt to say. (183)

Culpable obtuseness. He should know better. That's one reason why we don't use the a-word, for example, of little children. They can merit the s-word, because there's a malignity that's innate in little kids sometimes, but you can't merit the a-word until you're old enough so that you ought to know better.

It's not odd these days to hear politicians trumpeting their own authenticity, a claim that an earlier day would have considered self-cancelling. But when Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum say "I'm authentic," they're not evoking the shade of Neal Cassady. (102)

The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205)

It's important that these people think of their adversaries specifically as assholes. That's what gives the modern rhetoric of polarization its singular stamp and makes it different from the execrations of other ages. Seeing our antagonists as assholes means, for one thing, that the enmity is personal. (189)

When Roger Ailes said that NPR executives were 'the left wing of Nazism," he wasn't trying to tar NPR as evil in the eyes of the general public or the Congress, but to signal to others on his team that they owed NPR no courtesy or respect and had permission to be assholes about the organization. (209-10)

Or in a gothic version of the genre, the asshole is the jerk who's the first to get chopped up in a slasher film or the first to be chomped up in one of the Hannibal Lecter movies. But Lecter himself is the furthest thing in the world from an asshole. Whatever else he may be, he's scarcely self-deluded.

It is false, this teaching of decay. —James McNeill Whistler