Quotes from Jon Lovett

A great speech can make you remember something about what you believe, about who you are, about who you want to be. It's rare when that kind of thing happens. But it is important, and it is real.

The First Amendment's protections have always put a great deal of responsibility in our hands: not only to respect the power of our own speech, but also to respect that same power in the hands of people we despise.

One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world.

Everybody hates Congress; even Congress hates Congress.

I went into politics for the reasons most people do: ambition, self-righteousness, and a desire to help others.

Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it's convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.

I'm famously humble.

If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news, it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.

So often on CNN, there's a world-class journalist interviewing campaign rejects and ideologues and silly, craven people who do not care about informing people, that aren't there to help people understand what's going on in the news.

One of the lessons of 2016 is to spend less time worrying about what will happen and more time worrying about what we want to happen.

America needs a strong, rational, positive, practical conservative movement. It needs that bulwark against liberal delusion and hubris. It needs a voice that says we are imperfect, that life is complex, that government can create need even as it meets need, that you can't fix everything, and freedom is worth some danger and sorrow.

Because the speech is an argument, and a great speech makes an argument well, the act of making that argument is a really important part of how the policy process coalesces and solidifies both for the candidate and also the people serving that candidate.

There is an incredible appetite out there for in-depth, high-level conversations about what's going on.

We have a lot of really boring, silly, stupid politics. We need people to point that out.

Humor is a way of saying we're all seeing the same ridiculous, absurd, infuriating things together.

We don't want people to be afraid of saying something interesting on the off chance it's taken the wrong way.

I am very glad that Paul Ryan left the government as a capitulating supplicant to Donald Trump while the government was shut down, while the debt hit record levels, right? Every single thing Paul Ryan claimed to care about.

I'll always cringe remembering those little embarrassing moments when I said something dumb on a conference call, when my inexperience poked through, when I should have been more solicitous of the judgment of those around me. They're a reminder that it's not mutually exclusive to be confident and humble, to be skeptical and eager to learn.

As a rule, I think people in L.A. are interested in any writer who brings a different skill set and experiences. There's an attraction to novelty and to anyone whose writing isn't based in screenwriting. I had that novelty.

Part of my job as a presidential speechwriter (along with great writers like Jon Favreau and David Axelrod) was finding that sliver where 'presidential' and 'actually funny' overlap.

The Internet didn't cause Donald Trump, and it certainly can't solve Donald Trump.

I personally believe that Donald Trump being elected president is a national emergency and a crisis that stems from a great cascade of failures.

Republicans paint everything that Democrats have been for as socialism, too far to the left, as extreme, and it didn't matter how moderated it was; it didn't matter that Obamacare started out as a compromise. You might as well say what you're actually for and show what you really are.

Every technology company should have a red button somewhere in the headquarters where, if they realize they've caused more societal harm than they expected and done more harm than good, they press the button, and the company dissolves instantly.