Andrew McCarthy > Quotes

“There's something in the act of setting out that renews me, that fills me with a feeling of possibility. On the road, I'm forced to rely on instinct and intuition, on the kindness of strangers, in ways that illuminate who I am, ways that shed light on my motivations, my fears.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down

“As is often the case when I travel, my vulnerability -- like not knowing what the hell I'm going to do upon arrival -- makes me more open to outside interactions than I might be when I'm at home and think I know best what needs to be done. On the road, serendipity is given space to enter my life.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down

“Travel does this: it creates space that allows thoughts and memories to intrude and assert themselves with impunity. Smells and sights, the quality of light, the honk of a horn -- can all act as touchstones when least expected.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down

“...among a certain generation of people, the work I did as a young man will forever burn brightest... more importantly, it is the memory of the work that is so valuable to people. Because in the memory of those movies exists a touchstone of youth, of when life was all ahead, when the future was a blank slate, when anything was possible.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“The intrepid traveler Freya Stark once said, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” The uncomplicated joy of meeting a new day with no past, with no plan, and with no one in the world knowing where I am can be compared only to waking up on Christmas morning when I was a child. It’s the closest I have ever come to understanding the word “freedom.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down

“My dear poor boy, the truth today is not the truth tomorrow.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“No one here knows who you were before. You are free to reinvent yourself. You”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“Willful and repeated violation of the Constitution is the textbook example of high crimes and misdemeanors.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“Sometimes things happen, we live with their result, and then occasionally, a long time distant, we try to make sense of them.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“Republicans, as well as Democrats committed to our constitutional framework, should fearlessly marshal the administration’s frauds, obstructions, and violations of law. They should demand transparency and accountability for the lies, the broken oaths, the betrayal of the rule of law, and the damage wrought—including lives not only devastated but lost due to the administration’s recklessness.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“Being happy is surpassed only by the ability to recognize and appreciate that happiness in the moment.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain

“On Obama’s watch, the Justice Department has enforced the laws in a politicized and racially discriminatory manner. It has, furthermore, filed and threatened vexatious lawsuits against sovereign states to obstruct their lawful execution of public policy—particularly, the enforcement of laws against illegal immigration and election fraud.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“Techno emerged in the early to mideighties in and around Detroit, at the hands of black middle-class DJs who for some reason idealized the glamour and suavity of European electronic pop and Italo disco, as it reached them via GQ and the radio DJ who called himself the Electrifying Mojo. They brought some rigor and a hint of Motown to it and created an industrial-sounding music that was funky, futuristic, and kind of arch—evoking the auto plants that were putting these kids’ parents out of work.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Most Berlin nightclubs aren’t like the American kind. Security is light, rules are lax. Generally there is no bottle service, no VIP section, and, Berghain aside, no velvet rope. In this respect, they bear little resemblance to, say, Studio 54, which, glorious as it may have been, begat a stratified style that metastasized into the models-and-bankers Maybach-and-Cristal rat race that deflected a generation away from the clubbing life in the U.S.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“Berlin is to electronic music what Florence was to Renaissance art: crucible, arbiter, patron. Credit for this could go as far back as Bismarck; the city owes its peculiar fertility as much to the follies of statesmen and generals as to any generation of ardent youth. Citizens have spoken and sung for many years of the “Berliner Luft”—“the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air,” as Conrad Alberti wrote in 1889, “which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“The president and his subordinates at the Department of Justice have used the executive’s awesome law enforcement power, including its access to vast sums of public money for conducting investigations and filing lawsuits, to intimidate the states into complying with Obama administration policies, including when those policies conflict with the states’ lawful powers, prerogatives and obligations under the Constitution and state law.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“In addition, he and his subordinates have repeatedly, systematically and willfully provided Congress and the American people with false information about matters of grave public concern.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“had known all evening that beneath my former schoolmate’s “Good for you” platitudes resided this resentment that epitomized his true feeling. While my wary, even suspicious nature was no doubt responsible for blocking out opportunities for friendship and intimacy, there was no denying that I also possessed a vigilant third eye that was perceptive in the ways of falsehood. During this phase and beyond, I used experiences such as my classmate’s floor spitting as proof of people’s insincerity. I used it to further isolate myself—to my own detriment. It”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“It gave me stature while diminishing me, made me a part of something even as it isolated me, gave me a platform and limited my options.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“Everything I have, everything I became, none of it would have been possible without you. Because of you, because of what you taught me, because of the belief you showed in me, because of what you saw in me, long before I could see it myself. I owe so much to you. And I need to tell you that.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“Having turned a deaf ear to the Iranian people in 2009 when they were being crushed while attempting to rise up against their totalitarian regime—the leading state sponsor of jihadist terror52—President Obama reached out in 2013 to the Iranian regime’s new front man, President Hassan Rouhani.53”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“He and his subordinates have repeatedly, systematically and willfully withheld from Congress and from the American people information to which they are entitled, despite numerous congressional requests, the issuance of congressional subpoenas, and the filing of Freedom of Information Act demands.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“The guidebooks and placards inside don’t tell you that these sites were created more to influence international opinion than to memorialize the dead.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015

“The simple reality was that I had nothing to go back to. Any structure I had loosely clung to (or resisted) had been removed.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“Congressional Democrats want the current president to use the enormous raw power vested in his office by Article II to achieve statist transformation. If he does so, they will support him. They do not insist that he comply with congressional statutes—which must be consistent with the Constitution in order to be valid, and thus may reflect the very constitutional values the left is trying to supplant.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“The president and his subordinates willfully defrauded the American people, including investors in the public securities exchanges, in connection with Solyndra, a solar energy enterprise that he and his subordinates subsidized with over half a billion taxpayer dollars despite obvious indication that the venture was not viable and would collapse.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“using alcohol to unlock creativity, calling it a tonic for the “tortured artist,” and even simply labeling it “a good man’s failing”—are all fallacies adopted for sensational and self-glorifying reasons to theatricalize and justify the mundane, singular, and selfish tragedy that excessive drinking creates.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Brat: An '80s Story

“In addition to facilitating the arming of jihadists during the war, in violation of American criminal laws against material support to terrorism, the president’s policy enabled jihadists affiliated with al-Qaeda to seize parts of the regime’s arsenal in the chaotic aftermath of Qaddafi’s assassination. Thus fortified, terrorists conducted violent operations against American and other Western targets in the region.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“If a president is the type of man who couples his hope with audacity, if he is willing to play Alinsky-style hardball despite his oath to uphold the Constitution and faithfully execute the law, there is little that can stand in his way—not if Congress is unwilling to use its competing constitutional powers.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama s Impeachment

“set in motion a decade of wandering that rewrote how I experienced the world. Travel became not so much about the destination as an end but a means of understanding myself in that place. The world became my university campus.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Best American Travel Writing 2015