Andrew Sullivan Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Andrew Michael Sullivan was born in 1963 in England and raised in a Catholic household that shaped his lifelong engagement with faith, doubt, and tradition. As a student at Oxford University, he immersed himself in history and political thought and became a prominent debater. The intellectual currents of British conservatism, especially the skeptical, anti-utopian strands associated with Edmund Burke and the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, strongly influenced his emerging worldview. After Oxford, he pursued graduate study in political theory at Harvard University, deepening his engagement with constitutionalism, the limits of state power, and the importance of civil society in modern democracies.

Entry into Journalism
Sullivan came to public attention in the United States through magazines and newspapers before taking the helm of The New Republic in the early 1990s. Becoming editor at a notably young age, he presided over a tumultuous, highly visible period for the magazine under its owner and mentor figure Marty Peretz. He sought to broaden the range of argument and assemble a lively mix of reportage, essays, and criticism that put heterodox ideas into conversation. His tenure was marked by sharp, sometimes polarizing editorial choices, including the decision to publish Betsy McCaughey's widely debated piece on health care reform and to host material related to The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which drew fierce criticism and prompted extensive debate on methods, evidence, and public policy. The experience cemented Sullivan's identity as an editor willing to test boundaries and to convene voices from different corners of the political spectrum.

Ideas and Advocacy
Alongside editorial leadership, Sullivan developed a distinctive authorial voice. In 1989, he published Here Comes the Groom, a landmark essay arguing for civil marriage rights for same-sex couples at a time when few public intellectuals made the case in such terms. He expanded those arguments in Virtually Normal, a book that framed gay equality as consistent with conservative principles of individual liberty, family stability, and limited government. He also wrote deeply personal reflections on the HIV/AIDS crisis, publicly disclosing his HIV-positive status and recounting loss, friendship, and survival in Love Undetectable. These works made him a key figure in the conversation about LGBT rights, public health, and the moral language of citizenship.

Pioneer of Blogging
Sullivan was among the earliest high-profile writers to embrace blogging, launching The Daily Dish in the early 2000s. He used the blog to fuse reportage, argument, curation, and reader correspondence in near real time, a then-novel editorial form. The Daily Dish moved across several institutional homes, including Time, The Atlantic under editor James Bennet, and The Daily Beast led by Tina Brown, before becoming a subscription-based independent site known simply as The Dish. With a small, agile team, he helped define the blog as an interactive forum in which readers not only consumed but also contributed to the conversation by challenging, correcting, and supplementing posts. The project ended in 2015 after years of relentless pace, but its influence on digital journalism and audience engagement remained unmistakable.

Politics and Public Debate
Sullivan's political writing has often reflected his own evolution. He supported the early phases of the war on terror and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then publicly reassessed those positions as the costs and consequences became clearer. He condemned the use of torture and abusive detention practices, and his blog chronicled, in detail, the moral and legal arguments surrounding executive power in wartime during the presidency of George W. Bush. In the 2008 election cycle, he made a prominent case for Barack Obama, notably in essays that articulated the possibility of a post-Baby Boomer political realignment. Equally, he applied withering scrutiny to the claims and record of Sarah Palin, prompting a fractious debate over standards of political accountability and the boundaries of commentary. Throughout, he engaged frequently with peers and sparring partners, including the late Christopher Hitchens, as he tried to reconcile conservative dispositions with liberal democratic reforms.

Books, Columns, and Long-Form Work
Beyond his early books, Sullivan explored the moral psychology of belief and the tension between dogma and doubt in The Conservative Soul, arguing for humility and restraint as conservative virtues. His essays have appeared in a range of venues and often return to themes of pluralism, religious freedom, and the challenge of maintaining a common civic culture across profound differences. After stepping back from daily blogging, he wrote a regular column for New York Magazine, where he revisited national politics, populism, and cultural change, before departing in 2020. He then launched The Weekly Dish, a subscriber-supported newsletter that reestablished his dialogue with readers and expanded into conversations and interviews through The Dishcast, allowing him to sustain long-form argument and debate outside traditional newsroom structures.

Religion, Identity, and Citizenship
A practicing Catholic who has often criticized the hierarchy, Sullivan has written candidly about the Church's teachings on sexuality, the clergy abuse crisis, and the contrasting styles of recent popes. He has engaged with the hopes raised by Pope Francis and wrestled with the theological and institutional tensions that continue to define global Catholicism. His move to the United States, gradual immersion in American political life, and eventual naturalization as a U.S. citizen added another layer to his public identity, positioning him as a transatlantic commentator who could juxtapose British and American traditions while insisting on shared liberal-democratic commitments.

Personal Life
Sullivan has written with unusual transparency about his personal life, including the experience of living with HIV in the era of antiretroviral therapies and the sense of stewardship that comes with surviving a generational catastrophe. He has also written about love and partnership and, in 2007, married his husband, Aaron Tone. The intimacy of his reader correspondence, cultivated first on The Daily Dish and revived in The Weekly Dish, has often extended the personal into the public sphere, creating a community that debates, corrects, and accompanies him through shifts of mind and circumstance.

Style and Method
His style blends close reading of texts and data with moral argument and a conversational cadence shaped by blogging. He prizes links, citations, and reader pushback, often publishing dissent, corrections, and updates to keep a real-time record of thinking in progress. This method has produced some of his most influential work, but also some of his most controversial episodes, including moments when speed and conviction outran caution. He has addressed these episodes by acknowledging error and attempting to model a public process of correction, a stance rooted in his belief that liberal institutions depend on criticism, transparency, and an open exchange of ideas.

Legacy and Influence
Sullivan's legacy lies in the crossing of boundaries: between magazine and digital journalism, between conservative and liberal traditions, and between the personal essay and public policy analysis. The people around him in his career mark those crossings: Marty Peretz in the magazine world; James Bennet and Tina Brown in the evolution of online journalism; political figures like George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin who shaped the arguments he made; and intellectual touchstones such as Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott who informed his temperament. Add to that peers like Christopher Hitchens, whose friendship and debate helped sharpen his prose, and readers whose persistent engagement helped forge a distinctive public voice. Whether writing about faith, freedom, sexuality, or state power, Sullivan sought to hold together a commitment to pluralism with a recognition of the limits of certainty, a balance that has made his work a reference point in the recent history of political commentary in the English-speaking world.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Andrew, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Writing - Equality - Honesty & Integrity - Reason & Logic.