Quotessence
Home / Quotes / W Quotes

W Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All W Quotes

“Why was I in a basement saying, "I'm alone here," wielding a lead pipe and crowbars? It was like I was doing the Vietnam War. It was like I was being America. If I put a blindfold on, I can't see you as people, which seemed to be what the United States was doing. I mean, it was important for people in my generation, because I grew up in the '40s, at a time when America was supposedly the hero nation. America saved Europe. And, some years later, we realized, America is a criminal.”

“Why was it sensible for Americans to transubstantiate a convention into the virtual embodiment of the People? After all, as with an ordinary legislative assembly, a convention assembly may improve the ultimate quality of public deliberation, see, e.g., THE FEDERALIST No. 55, at 342 (J. Madison), but only by excluding most citizens, thereby raising fiduciary/agency problems. An answer based on organization theory/incentive analysis might focus on how a ratification convention is structured differently from an ordinary legislature in ways that enhance monitoring and improve public accountability. First, the People select convention delegates in a special election. Second, delegates are generally convened to consider a single issue (ratification). Third and related, the basic choice set is binary (yes-no), reducing agenda manipulation problems and decreasing the monitoring problems that exist in an ordinary legislature with virtually infinite possibilities of side deals and vote trading. Fourth, conventions immediately disband and disperse among the People, reducing the problem of legislators entrenching themselves and developing their own institutional perspectives. Finally, a convention enhances a sense of public-spiritedness and individual moral responsibility among both voters and delegates. Calling a "convention" signals to all concerned that the polity is entering a high-stakes moment when basic ground rules will be hammered out. Interestingly, criminal juries (deciding the single issue of individual guilt or innocence) possess many more convention attributes than do ordinary legislatures.”

“Why was it so impossible to find anyone to love me? Was that really so difficult? Guys today sucked. Really, they did; it couldn’t be me, right? That was what I kept trying to convince myself of. But deep down, I knew better. Of course, it was me. Me. I was the problem.”

“Why was it that as people let go of their belief in the supernatural they still continued to hang on to the negative myths yet quickly discarded the positive? Nobody saw her as a tree spirit or sky maiden now as they did hundreds of years ago, Nobody even saw her as an angel, maybe because they saw her at night and despite all the lighting in the modern world, the fear of the night persisted.”