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

“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

“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

“No one here knows who you were before. You are free to reinvent yourself. You”
― 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

“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

“The president and his subordinates have willfully undermined and prejudiced the rights of the American people to equal protection under the law and to engage in free political speech and association. He and his subordinates have employed the awesome powers of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the interest of partisan politics, selectively harassing conservative groups opposed to the president’s policies and denying them the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

“The president and his subordinates have also taken the position that the federal government has a veto over a church’s choice of its ministers and employees. The Supreme Court rejected this offensive claim in a 9–0 ruling that even included the two justices appointed to the high court by the president.26”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

“The Obama dream is the nightmare about which Alexis de Tocqueville warned: a comparatively soft tyranny, in which the individual serves an “immense and tutelary” state and its centrally planned, punctiliously regulated society, enjoying only as much liberty as the government deigns to grant him.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

“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

“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

“The president has willfully defrauded the American people in the enactment and implementation of Obamacare.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

“The HHS rule blatantly denies the breadth of First Amendment protection, and violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, under which Congress promotes First Amendment liberty by prohibiting government from unduly burdening religious freedom.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

“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

“The president and his subordinates have violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. The president and his subordinates at the Department of Health and Human Services have promulgated a regulatory mandate, under the PPACA, requiring that the insurance policies that Americans are now compelled to purchase must cover FDA-approved forms of contraception, including abortifacients.”
― 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

“At home, the administration consulted with “experts” it has refused to identify in purging information about Islamic supremacism—the ideology that drives our enemies—from materials used to train law enforcement, intelligence, and military personnel responsible for our security. The obsession with bleaching the Islam out of Islamic terrorism reached mind-boggling lengths with the administration’s refusal to brand the Fort Hood massacre—in which thirteen Americans, mostly military personnel, were killed and dozens more wounded—as an act of terrorism.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

“The rise of the administrative state over the last century has profoundly challenged the Constitution’s framework, but President Obama has quite intentionally undertaken to dismantle that framework.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

“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

“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

“president is principally responsible for the misfeasance and malfeasance of his administration. He is not just an innocent bystander.”
― Andrew McCarthy, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment

“The president has willfully defrauded the American people in the enactment and implementation of Obamacare. In addition, he has unilaterally and unlawfully amended and “waived” the statute’s terms—guided by his knowledge that timely, lawful application of the deeply unpopular law would be devastating to his party’s electoral prospects and would have made him a one-term president.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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