Explore Quotes by Zephyr Teachout

After Citizens United, unlimited money could go directly to a corporate entity that can tell people who to vote for, with names and polling places included.

When elections are not democratic, even the most populist discussions become superficial, disconnected from real power; they are theatre.

Political corruption is eating our democracy out from the inside. Most Americans know that. But democratic and economic health can't be easily disentangled.

The federal government has shown little willingness to stand up to corporate monopolies, and use its powers under the existing antitrust statutes, including the powerful Clayton Act and Sherman Act.

There is so much we don't know about Facebook. We know we have a corporate monopoly that has repeated serious violations that are threatening our democracy.

The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn't want to.

The public should have access to unfettered communication and commerce, and the Internet is increasingly the medium where that takes place.

Women's voices need to be in politics, and shaping politics from the very beginning, not serve as an afterthought.

Congress is corrupt, gridlocked, broken, dysfunctional. It's not working and we need it working again. It's not going to get fixed by people who are deeply, in one way or another, inside this really broken system.

I'm an FDR Democrat, and I really believe that the most important thing is the institutions of political parties, and engaging in those institutions, and, where you disagree with them, speaking up and sharing your disagreement.

Talking to Republicans who aren't leaders - that's not very difficult both on anti-trust and on campaign finance reform. I think it's a lot more complicated when you talk to highly funded leaders - that's the innate, deeply problematic part of our politics.

There's this myth out there that self-perpetuates that candidates believe that although the populace cares about corruption, they're not going to vote on it.

So paid media is when you buy an ad - typically in a presidential campaign that will be in Iowa, New Hampshire, the early states. It costs some money to make the ad, but the greatest cost is in actually placing the ad on TV.

I think a lot of campaigns mis-learned the lessons of Obama 2008. They overly focused on the particular tools, and less so on the fact that the Internet enables a kind of culture of trust to be translated into real power.

I'm going to Congress to break down the doors of power.

Voters have a responsibility to make a judgment with whatever facts are available on Election Day.

New York has really thrived both upstate and downstate when there are tens of thousands of small businesses all representing their different creative impulses.

So the job of building structures, building a constitutional structure, is not just to punish those who behave badly but actually to protect people from their own temptations.

Corruption is when people in public office use that public office for private or selfish ends. This is one of the most central debates in the last 40 years in law, what is corruption.

To be fair, money and politics never work in a directly straight line.

The key to fixing public financing is to free politics from big money.