Wendy Kaminer Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.

Wendy Kaminer
As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.

Wendy Kaminer
Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best — monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.

Wendy Kaminer
I'm not blaming religion for all or even most human barbarism. Of course faith in God generates compassion and altruism as well. Religious belief probably motivated some rescue workers who tried so heroically to save people from the wreckage. Religious belief offers solace and strength to people in the awful aftermath of the attack. But while they gather together to pray and seek comfort, protection, or approval from God, so do the terrorists. Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack, we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.

Wendy Kaminer
Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least.

Wendy Kaminer
Jerry Falwell knows who caused the terrorist attack on America: the ACLU. The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this, he declared on the 700 Club, because, he explained, the ACLU, abetted by the federal courts is responsible for throwing God out of the public square (and) the public schools.
This is a familiar charge and a false one. God is still present in the public schools, where students are free to pray, alone or in groups, so long as their prayers aren't officially sponsored and don't infringe on anyone's freedom not to pray.

Wendy Kaminer
When the government seeks to expand its power to spy on us, for example, it should be required to show how the loss of anonymity and freedom will make us safer. The FBI already enjoys the broad power to eavesdrop; according to government reports, it intercepts some two million innocent telephone and Internet conversations every year. The administration wants to expand its power to conduct surveillance by minimizing the role of the courts in monitoring it. Will this make us safer from terrorism or simply less safe from our government?

Wendy Kaminer
Not everything that appears true is true. The ACLU is devoted to some very controversial principles — like the principle that everyone who is arrested should enjoy the same constitutional rights, regardless of their alleged crime or their character. We don't take that position to irritate people; we take that position because we believe in it. We believe in it, in part, in a spirit of enlightened self-interest, because the rights of each one of us are co-extensive with the rights of everyone who is arrested and prosecuted in the criminal courts. If we all don't enjoy the same rights, then no one enjoys any rights at all; some of us merely enjoy privilege.

Wendy Kaminer
Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice — a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.

Wendy Kaminer
Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.

Wendy Kaminer
Spirituality authors, who are generally forgiving of most human foibles... take a hard line on intellectualism.... Skepticism they view with contempt, as the refuge of the unenlightened.

Wendy Kaminer