Mike Rowe

"Clean and dirty aren't opposites. They're two sides of the same coin, just like innovation and imitation, like risk and responsibility, like peripeteia and anagnorisis."

"Politics by nature requires you to ask the question you just asked in a very broad, macro way. Right? We have to consider policies that are essentially cookie-cutter because in the political world your ideas need to impact the largest number of people possible. That’s macro-works. My foundation is called Mike Rowe Works. Yes, my name is in it but it’s supposed to be MICRO. I’m looking for one person at a time. I can’t gauge the worth ethic of a cohort or a group or a race or a star sign. I need to meet the individual and if we want to reward the qualities that are sorely lacking you can’t take a cookie-cutter approach. That’s sort of a way of saying I’m not in politics because I’m not interested in policies that have these giant effects on large numbers of people. It’s not that I’m opposed to them, but it’s just that the only way to get elected is to go out there and talk in platitudes and tropes and generalities and bromides. That’s what people are sick of hearing."