Quotes from Cass Sunstein

If you have an architecture of control, let's say, where you select in advance everything that's going to affect your life, then you're going to live in a very small world that will have an echo chamber feature... Pandora, which I love, actually feeds into that.

One lesson is that if you want to predict voter turnout, you should ask whether at least one candidate is attracting high levels of enthusiasm - not whether the stakes are high, or even perceived to be high. That fits the historical pattern.

Voters like to fall in love with presidential candidates, at least a little bit.

Masterful politicians and effective agents of change tend to succeed by singling out and making salient some aspect of a nation's self-understanding, sparking a sense of recognition - and ultimately moving voters in their favor. Obama made it into an art form.

After a two-term presidency, many young voters seem to want someone who is radically different from, even the opposite of, the commander in chief to whom they have become accustomed. After all, a two-term president will have led their nation for a significant percentage of their lives. That's boring. Isn't it time for a transformation?

When it comes to discrimination, Americans pride ourselves on how far we've come. Racial segregation is history. Explicit sex discrimination is banned. Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. But amidst all the progress, the male-female wage gap persists, and it's big.

Bottom 10 Percent progressives are not enthusiastic about concentrations of wealth. But that's not what keeps them up at night. Their focus is on deprivation and lack of opportunity. They're motivated by empathy for people who are suffering, rather than outrage over unjustified wealth.

We ought to ban hunting, I suggest, if there isn't a purpose other than sport and fun. That should be against the law. It's time now.

The economic analysis of law has had many good ideas. It's had one great idea -like, world-transforming idea, I think. And the idea is, when you're stuck, minimize the sum of the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.

If you like dark movies or light movies, 'The Empire Strikes Back' is one of the great movies of all time. It's probably the greatest movie of all time. 'A New Hope' is a superb movie. It's probably the second-greatest movie of all time, but 'The Empire Strikes Back' is better.

I think the arc of history is long, and it bends toward justice. And I think that's what the 'Star Wars' message is. You know, the dark side is in the human heart. And chaos is very troubling for an individual or for a culture, which can lead you to authoritarian leaders. But the arc of history is on the right side. I believe that.

The only answer to the question 'Which is the worst of the 'Star Wars' movies?' is, there is no worst 'Star Wars' movie. There - one might be the least amazing and fantastic, but there's none that is the worst of the 'Star Wars' movies.

One of the things 'Star Wars' is most deeply about is fathers, sons, and redemption. In its own way, it points to the indispensability of paternal love, and it has a lot to say about the lengths to which people - boys or girls - will go to get it.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

If you have a regulation that's going to save hundreds of thousands of lives annually and not cost very much, that sounds like a very good idea.

The opening scene in A New Hope, when you see the huge ship, it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on... that is like a joke of awesomeness.

I strongly believe that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to possess and use guns for purposes of both hunting and self-defense.

Rules are not improved by sloganeering, fact-free letter-writing campaigns, or special pleading from interest groups.

Web publishing can create common spaces; it all depends on how we, the readers and sometimes the producers, react to technological change. If we sort ourselves into narrow groups, common spaces will be in big trouble. But there's no reason not to have common spaces on the Internet. There are lots of them out there.

Television is, in many respects, a passive medium: people receive information without really exchanging ideas with others. By contrast, the Internet can be an active medium, allowing individuals to use e-mail, discussion groups, and even Web sites to engage with one another.

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

As an academic, a great deal of my time is spent writing, with very little in meetings. In government, the premium is placed on figuring things out through discussing them with other people.

This part of the 21st century is preoccupied with risk, and there's a lot that law can do to make lives longer and healthier.

I think President Obama has been an extraordinarily successful president, and that this period will record that with a bunch of exclamation points. But obviously, not everybody thinks that.