Cass R. Sunstein Quotes

Cass Robert Sunstein

Cass R. Sunstein is an American legal scholar known for his studies of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics. (Cass R. Sunstein Quotes)

“Any heterogeneous society faces a risk of fragmentation.”
Cass R. Sunstein
#republic

“As Joseph Schumpeter remarked, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, but you can fool enough of the people for long enough to do irreversible damage.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Can It Happen Here?

“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Can It Happen Here?

“By itself, partyism is not the most serious threat to democratic self-government. But if it decreases government’s ability to solve serious problems, then it has concrete and potentially catastrophic consequences for people’s lives.”
Cass R. Sunstein
#republic

“Do not be misled by expert bravado or by an expert’s own sense of how he or she is doing. Evidence is a much better guide than an impressive self-presentation.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Wiser

“Economists suggest that we should assess the value of decisions in terms of two considerations: the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Wiser

“Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.”
Cass R. Sunstein
On Rumors

“If public opinion cannot express itself through political associations, newspapers, and electoral politics, it will be channeled into mob violence.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Can It Happen Here?

“If we understand “rights” to be legal protection against harm, then many animals already do have rights, and the idea of animal rights is not terribly controversial.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Animal Rights

“In the long term, Trump, if successful, may be able to replace disloyal appointees with loyal appointees, and may be able to attract loyalists to civil service positions. In the short term, he can threaten to undermine agencies that fail to do his bidding or in any other way pose a threat to his power.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Can It Happen Here?

“In the United States both plates and portions have increased dramatically over time. A really good nudge would be to make them smaller.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Simpler

“It can be masked with a veneer of legality, it can be cloaked with plausible deniability. It is always possible to justify each incremental step.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Can It Happen Here?

“Janis believed that groups are especially likely to suffer from groupthink if they are cohesive, have highly directive leadership, and are insulated from experts.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Wiser

“Or consider the fact that after people buy a new car, they often love to read advertisements that speak enthusiastically about the same car that they have just obtained. Those advertisements tend to be comforting because they confirm the wisdom of the decision to purchase that particular car. If you are a member of a particular political party or have strong convictions, you might want support, reinforcement, and ammunition, not criticism.”
Cass R. Sunstein
#republic

“Our favorite messengers are sometimes wrong and our least favorite messengers are sometimes right.”
Cass R. Sunstein
How to Humble a Wingnut and Other Lessons from Behavioral Economics

“Partyism certainly isn’t as horrible as racism; no one is enslaved or turned into a lower caste. But according to some measures, partyism now exceeds racism.” (Cass R. Sunstein Quotes)
Cass R. Sunstein
#republic

“Social scientists emphasize that people use the “availability heuristic,” which means that we assess risks by asking whether a bad (or good) event is cognitively “available.”
Cass R. Sunstein
How to Humble a Wingnut and Other Lessons from Behavioral Economics

“Some rumors simultaneously relieve “a primary emotional urge” and offer an explanation, to those who accept them, of why they feel as they do; the rumor “rationalizes while it relieves.”
Cass R. Sunstein
On Rumors

“Terrible events produce outrage, and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumors that justify their emotional states, and also to attribute those events to intentional action.”
Cass R. Sunstein
On Rumors

“The American constitutional order is meant to create a deliberative democracy, in which debate and discussion accompany accountability. This is not merely a system of majority rule, through which majorities get to do as they like simply because they are majorities. Reason-giving is central, and a deliberative democracy gives reasons.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Impeachment

“The French thinker Francois de La Rochefoucauld proclaimed: “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” If the Rule of Law sometimes produces hypocrisy, at least we know what counts as vice and what counts as virtue.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Impeachment

“The idea of “great and dangerous offenses” is an excellent shorthand for the views of the ratifiers—at least if we understand such offenses as including egregious abuses or misuses of official authority.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Impeachment

“They suggest that with respect to facts, partisan differences are much less sharp than they seem—and that political polarization is often an artifact of the survey setting.”
Cass R. Sunstein
How to Humble a Wingnut and Other Lessons from Behavioral Economics

“Those who emphasize animal rights have a more complicated task. They tend to urge that animals should be given rights to the extent that their capacities are akin to those of human beings. The usual emphasis here is on cognitive capacities. The line would be drawn between animals with advanced capacities, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, and those that lack such capacities. Undoubtedly a great deal of work needs to be done on this topic. But at least an emphasis on the capacity to think, and to form plans, seems to provide a foundation for appropriate line drawing by those who believe in animal rights in a strong sense.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Animal Rights

“We are blind to the fact that what we do to them deprives them of their rights; we do not want to see this because we profit from it, and so we make use of what are really morally irrelevant differences between them and ourselves to justify the difference in treatment.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Animal Rights

“We can believe in hierarchy. We can believe the universe was made just for us. Hierarchy and a major sense of entitlement are not insurmountable problems. The problem occurs when we treat those whom we believe lie beneath us as slaves. Religion once sustained human slavery. It was wrong then. When it blindly sanctions the slavery of every nonhuman animal, it is wrong now.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Animal Rights

“Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by social media, provide a form of social glue. A national holiday is a shared experience. So is a major sports event (the Olympics or the World Cup), or a movie that transcends individual and group differences (Star Wars is a candidate).”
Cass R. Sunstein
#republic

“Worst of all, we might miss the real opportunities for a thoughtful, other-regarding reconciliation of two critical parts of our human nature: the desire to liberate and enable the individual, and the impetus to protect and serve the collective.”
Cass R. Sunstein
Can It Happen Here?

“You can become radicalized in the sense that you come to believe, firmly, a position that is within the political mainstream—for example, that your preferred political candidate is not just the best but immeasurably better than the alternatives, and that any other choice would be catastrophic.”
Cass R. Sunstein
#republic