Explore Quotes by Zephyr Teachout

Quid pro quo has an interesting history. It's originally a contract law term, not a criminal bribery term.

In the absence of relative equality - quid pro quo - a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.

The Internet doesn't just enable cool avatars and the shorter form. It also allows the deeper form: cross-linked blog posts, extensive research, simultaneous screens and raw debate footage that anyone can scan online, at any time.

Normally, politicians lie because they want to persuade us of the truth of what they are saying. A candidate for Congress will claim that he earned a medal of honor when he did not, so that we will love and revere him.

Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.

Amazon's outsized power is looking less and less like smart business and more and more like oppressive politics - one company bullying us all.

I represented a man on death row whose lawyers had spent all of eight hours looking into his claim of innocence. I met men whose lawyers had never looked into their backgrounds.

We need to ban outside income for elected officials. Transparency alone is not enough; it doesn't solve the problem of creating outside dependencies.

Facebook and Google are essentially an advertising duopoly, and we have almost no idea how their algorithms work.

The work of being a citizen is hard and annoying, but it can pay off.

Anti-corruption is a core constitutional value. It always has been.

Every constitutional standard is engaged in difficult but important line-drawing.

Everybody's always going to have some self-interest. When it passes a certain point, that's when it become corruption.

It is an honor to join 'The Nation's esteemed editorial board.

Creating systems where people feel like they're being punished for things they didn't do wrong breaks all kinds of trust and makes people feel like they're not being treated with dignity.

Every politician should go and spend time and visit prisons and jails. Because if you are choosing to exercise this kind of power over another person's life, there's a role for that, but you have to know the kind of power you are exercising.

The science doesn't prove Common Core's effective. So I guess what I mean is science is an essential part of any decision-making process, and so is public involvement. And in the long-term, you lose legitimacy and power if you don't directly engage with the public.

A government should not become too big to fulfill one of its most basic functions: representation.

I hope that we increasingly shift power to local governments.

It's one of those secrets that not a lot of politicians realize: The Internet is not a 10th-tier policy issue. It's not an add-on policy. It's something that affects everybody's life.

The Internet is an important organizing tool. But the goal of a campaign isn't to use the Internet for organizing; the goal is always to win, and to change policy and politics.