Quotes from Jacob Weisberg

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong.

By 2003, if you didn't understand that the United States was inflicting torture on those deemed enemy combatants, you weren't paying much attention.

Objecting to someone because of his religious beliefs is not the same thing as prejudice based on religious heritage, race, or gender.

Both Left and Right take pleasure in mildly persecuting those who fail to meet their civic ideals.

Like other forms of gambling, wagering on the Internet isn't illegal because it's bad. It's bad because we've chosen to make it illegal.

If you want to go around saying that giving women the vote wrecked the country and still be taken seriously, it helps to be handing out $100 bills.

The first conversation I ever had about the Internet was in 1993 with Robert Wright, who was then a colleague at the 'New Republic.'

Trade, tourism, cultural exchange, and participation in international institutions all serve to erode the legitimacy of repressive regimes.

The party where humorless thought police work to enforce a rigid ideological discipline isn't made up of Democrats. It comprises Republicans.

Republicans with any moral sense are desperate for a supportable alternative to Donald Trump.

Sexual signals can be received without being consciously sent.

Though there are some debatable exceptions, sanctions rarely play a significant role in dislodging or constraining the behavior of despicable regimes.

If the creators of cartoons are intentionally or unintentionally giving children the idea that gay people are part of the big, happy human family, that's a good thing, not a bad one.

Abandoning traditions of responsibility and civility won the GOP control of both houses of Congress in 1994. Rejecting any compromise brought Republicans the perks and power of majority control for the first time in 40 years. Thus did the politics of total resistance become their path of least resistance.

Where Reagan channeled disenchantment with overweening government, Obama symbolized America's transformation into a multiracial country.

To count as transformative, a president needs to synthesize the moment and mood of the country.

As with the government failures that made 9/11 possible, neglecting to prevent the crash of '08 was a sin of omission - less the result of deregulation per se than of disbelief in financial regulation as a legitimate mechanism.

Like academic Marxists, who are their sisters under the skin, libertarians are far more interested in an ideal world than in the one where ordinary humans live.

The invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake.

The conservative position that all spending is evil obliterates any distinction between investment and consumption, between the long-term and the short-term.

Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections.

Joe Lieberman can be cloying and sanctimonious.

Within half an hour of posting a piece on 'Slate,' I get a direct, often hostile and personal, response from readers.

I think part of the reason anyone goes into journalism is to get a response to what they write.