Jon Lovett

We don't want people to be afraid of saying something interesting on the off chance it's taken the wrong way.

We are drowning in information.

A great speech can make you remember something about what you believe, about who you are, about who you want to be. It's rare when that kind of thing happens. But it is important, and it is real.

America needs a strong, rational, positive, practical conservative movement. It needs that bulwark against liberal delusion and hubris. It needs a voice that says we are imperfect, that life is complex, that government can create need even as it meets need, that you can't fix everything, and freedom is worth some danger and sorrow.

One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world.

I worked on one speech about the financial system that caused the Dow to drop, like, 200 points.

I'll always cringe remembering those little embarrassing moments when I said something dumb on a conference call, when my inexperience poked through, when I should have been more solicitous of the judgment of those around me. They're a reminder that it's not mutually exclusive to be confident and humble, to be skeptical and eager to learn.

Sometimes you're going to be inexperienced, naive, untested, and totally right. And then, in those moments, you have to make a choice: is this a time to speak up, or hang back?

Life tests our willingness, in ways large and small, to tell the truth.

Washington is filled with people making other people's arguments for money.

I personally believe that Donald Trump being elected president is a national emergency and a crisis that stems from a great cascade of failures.

When in doubt, mock the powerful, not the powerless.

I am a deeply awkward person; I am not cool.

I'm famously humble.

Every technology company should have a red button somewhere in the headquarters where, if they realize they've caused more societal harm than they expected and done more harm than good, they press the button, and the company dissolves instantly.

We've been dealing with censorship around multimedia, about multinational companies and the content they create, for a very long time.

I am very glad that Paul Ryan left the government as a capitulating supplicant to Donald Trump while the government was shut down, while the debt hit record levels, right? Every single thing Paul Ryan claimed to care about.

You look at what animates Democratic voters; you look at what animates Democratic politicians: it's health care. It's increasingly climate. It is wages and economic issues. It's issues around reproductive freedom and criminal justice reform and inequality.

People say that making money in the content-media game is hard, and that is just, like, not my experience. It's super-confusing, 'cause everyone's like, 'Oh, how are you going to monetize?' It's easy: just start talking, and then money rolls in.

I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.

We need to stop telling each other to shut up. We need to get comfortable with the reality that no one is going to shut up.

It's so unfair that Barack Obama, this cool, charming guy, also has good comedic timing.

When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber, and he used to be black, but he made himself white, and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Wacko Jacko.

Trump is a raptor testing the fences, and he found weaknesses to escape and try things that would work, every single day.

There are a lot of heartbroken, anxious people that thought better of their country. We're heartbroken by how far Trump has gotten to the most powerful position in the world.

The conversation on Twitter and the way people are in the world are very different.

I had a really fun career in TV right after I left politics.

If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news, it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.

Republicans paint everything that Democrats have been for as socialism, too far to the left, as extreme, and it didn't matter how moderated it was; it didn't matter that Obamacare started out as a compromise. You might as well say what you're actually for and show what you really are.

There is that definition of leadership that says, 'Leadership is convincing people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have done because you've made them believe it's the right thing to do.' And a great speech can do that.

Because the speech is an argument, and a great speech makes an argument well, the act of making that argument is a really important part of how the policy process coalesces and solidifies both for the candidate and also the people serving that candidate.

Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it's convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.