Jon Lovett Quotes

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.

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.

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

Part of my job as a presidential speechwriter (along with great writers like Jon Favreau and David Axelrod) was finding that sliver where ‘presidential’ and ‘actually funny’ overlap.

Little things had to go wrong for Donald Trump to become president: Comey, emails, all that stuff. Big things did make Trump possible. Big, cultural, political, economic forces opened the door to someone like Trump.

Nationalism is not that hard. It’s not that hard to incite people against another, and it’s also – and this is the harder thing: Democrats have, and the challenge we have all the time, is we believe in governing and governance and trying to find middle ground.

Humor connects us, especially in politics. It’s a way of surprising one another with shared context and experience.

The great thing about writing jokes for President Obama is that he is not afraid to tell jokes that are actually funny – and not just funny for a politician.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That’s what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential and aware of your inexperience.

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

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.

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

I’m not insulting Trump supporters; I’m calling the people that CNN puts on television terrible representatives of the views of conservatives.

They’re the last human beings susceptible to human shame. Politicians are the only people left for whom, occasionally, shame hurts them. Everyone else, we’ve sort of done away with it as a concept, and we’re hurtling through space like animals, basically.

It’s a reasonable thing to tell somebody, ‘I’ve watched 70 hours of ‘Game of Thrones.” That’s a totally normal, boring thing to say about yourself. But if you were like, ‘I just spent 100 hours playing ‘Skyrim,” people think you’re a weirdo.

It doesn’t matter what the early votes look like. It doesn’t matter what the polls look like. We can lose everything.

‘1600 Penn’ was a hit. It’s 2018. Anything you want can be true.

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

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.

The First Amendment’s protections have always put a great deal of responsibility in our hands: not only to respect the power of our own speech, but also to respect that same power in the hands of people we despise.

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.

We have a lot of really boring, silly, stupid politics. We need people to point that out.

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

When a joke works, it works. It can make a point in a really simple way; it can be a great little sound bite to put on television or share on social media. Humor has this incredible power in how we communicate about politics now, in part because there’s something natural in the way it’s communicated.

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

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.

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.

Barack Obama took office in the middle of a massive financial crisis. He was handed a bunch of messes all around the world and at home.

It was awesome how supportive the White House was. It meant a lot to me that when I left, the people that I worked with – Jon Favreau and David Axelrod and others – really understood that this was something that I felt I held had to do.

Humor is a way of saying we’re all seeing the same ridiculous, absurd, infuriating things together.

I would like to be able to write in my own voice.

It’s always been a dream of mine to write comedy and be creative.

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.

I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted.

I went into politics for the reasons most people do: ambition, self-righteousness, and a desire to help others.

I will never apologize for selective editing to make myself look better.

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?

It’s certainly true that presidents have confidantes who rise above what you would call just staff.

There’s only so much mistrust we can take before things get much worse.

A boring speech can be just a boring speech. But a speech with a joke that falls flat is awful. I hate it. That’s why I think it’s easier to hate a comedy. If a drama doesn’t land, it’s boring; if a joke doesn’t land – you hate that.

Kellyanne Conway is one of the most dishonest humans ever to grace the office she holds.

If you can make someone laugh about something that your opponent or your opposition thinks, that means you’ve done a really good job of highlighting what’s wrong with their argument or their position.

I’m motivated by a bottomless well of anger. It’s a joke, but I don’t think I don’t mean it.

I’m famously humble.