Timothy Noah Quotes

#1. Working people vote!

Timothy Noah

#2. The chief purpose of a union is to maximize the income of its members.

Timothy Noah

#3. Rule of thumb: When Democrats lose, they blame the candidate. When Republicans lose, they blame the opposition.

Timothy Noah

#4. The Sudan bombing is a blot on the Clinton presidency, and a blot it ought to remain.

Timothy Noah

#5. No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.

Timothy Noah

#6. You have to let the market reward effort and skill. But a system in which inequality of incomes constantly increases over time is worrisome.

Timothy Noah

#7. Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

Timothy Noah

#8. Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

Timothy Noah

#9. Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington - the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city's avatars of centrism and continuity - Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.

Timothy Noah

#10. The Bush administration got a lot of things horribly wrong in its disaster response to the New Orleans flood, and it deserves almost all of the bitter recriminations hurled its way.

Timothy Noah

#11. I'm an incompetent consumer. I have two settings: Buy and Don't Buy.

Timothy Noah

#12. For any politician who didn't enter office a wealthy man, nothing says 'I take bribes' like a Rolex watch.

Timothy Noah

#13. Stock prices relative to company assets are no better at signaling the likelihood of future earnings growth than they were the day the Titanic sank, and risk management is a good deal worse.

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#14. It never fails to astonish me how cheaply a politician can be bought.

Timothy Noah

#15. Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work.

Timothy Noah

#16. There's no shortage of Democrats who are at least as committed as Schwarzenegger to reducing greenhouse gases.

Timothy Noah

#17. The thing to strive for is to get paid to talk about yourself.

Timothy Noah

#18. When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'

Timothy Noah

#19. Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I'm glad to live in a capitalist country.

Timothy Noah

#20. If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court wishes us to believe, they are stunningly unpatriotic ones.

Timothy Noah

#21. It's no surprise that Mitt Romney bent himself into a pretzel to disavow the portions of Obamacare that derive from his own reform in Massachusetts.

Timothy Noah

#22. With its Medicaid expansion, Obamacare may turn out to be the most equality-promoting policy enacted in a generation.

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#23. There is quite a lot of mutual misunderstanding between the upper middle class and the working class. Reviewing what's been said about the white working class and the Democrats, I realized that there's even a lot of disagreement about who the working class IS.

Timothy Noah

#24. The pathological degree to which former Vice President Dick Cheney operated in secrecy led to government abuses that we'll probably spend years learning about.

Timothy Noah

#25. Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes.

Timothy Noah

#26. The U.S. policy of hoarding crude oil never made the world, or even the U.S., a safer place.

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#27. The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.

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#28. When the topic is growing income inequality, it's hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead, conservatives try to argue that it doesn't exist.

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#29. Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don't acquire wisdom from it.

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#30. Capitalism can't deliver decent health care.

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#31. Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.

Timothy Noah

#32. I'm all for lifting the payroll-tax cap, if only to make payroll taxes a little less regressive.

Timothy Noah

#33. Whatever the reason, American Muslims appear far less inclined to support the global jihad than their European counterparts.

Timothy Noah

#34. You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn't have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas.

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#35. Presidential election results in 2008 and 2012 clarified that talk radio was not, in fact, running the country.

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#36. Why does Medicare have such difficulty accommodating a cut - no, wait, a trim to its annual spending increase - of two measly percentage points? Two words: baby boom.

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#37. When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

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#38. Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn't. It's just hiding behind a call center in Manila.

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#39. There's a growing consensus that the best way to defeat communism in Cuba is to get its citizens hooked on American goods.

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#40. Voters care only that student loans remain freely available and that they cost taxpayers as little as possible.

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#41. Gun Owners of America is a lobby group dedicated to the proposition that the National Rifle Association is a bunch of accommodationist sissies.

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#42. The advantage of a market-based national defense is obvious: Every citizen would receive an individualized amount of military protection, based on the value each of us placed on defending the homeland.

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#43. Electing Barack Obama president was a glorious Jackie Robinson moment for the United States of America. Obama didn't just win; he became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a popular-vote majority.

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#44. Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford's.

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#45. What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

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#46. The United States is not, nor has ever been, anything close to a fascist country.

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#47. One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.

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#48. The problem with wanting the tax code to be 'simpler, fairer,' and 'pro-growth' is that it's impossible to achieve all three at the same time.

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#49. The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.

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#50. If we were to compile a list of the ways in which the United States has made both itself and the wider world a better place, then at or very near the top would be its commitment to universal education.

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#51. Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.

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#52. Washington culture has always had a difficult time acknowledging untruth.

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#53. The gulf between Virginia and Maryland isn't only a function of geography. It's also sociological. Indeed, it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that Maryland suburbanites and Virginia suburbanites constitute two mutually hostile tribes.

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#54. I've come to the conclusion that the government needs to impose price controls on tuition increases - and so, I think, has President Obama.

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#55. The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.

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#56. The Pentagon got fed up with its recruits getting ripped off by payday lenders and in 2007 got Congress to make it illegal to extend such loans to members of the military. But civilians remain fair game.

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#57. The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet.

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#58. We all need to save money to send our kids to college, to buy our first house, and to retire. But the truth is that most of us don't save very much.

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#59. What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university.

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#60. Democrats view elections as a means to an end, while Republicans view an election as an end in itself.

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#61. Was President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage crassly political? God, I hope so.

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#62. Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.

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#63. The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.

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#64. When a conservative praises a liberal as 'morally serious,' he means that person is less liberal than most.

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#65. Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all.

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#66. What the 1990s taught the Clinton veterans was that you could 'triangulate' with a GOP-controlled Congress.

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#67. An orthodox belief in big government's inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry's inability to compete with big government.

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#68. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.

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#69. The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.

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#70. The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

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#71. When businesses affirmatively like regulations, that's when to reach for your wallet.

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#72. With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.

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#73. The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.

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#74. President Obama has his faults, but overall, I think, is a good president.

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#75. What people want is big government that they don't have to pay for.

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#76. Obama is an intelligent man whose life and work experience sensitize him to class distinctions.

Timothy Noah

#77. The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'

Timothy Noah

#78. If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.

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#79. In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.

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#80. What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.

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#81. In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

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#82. Sometime, while I wasn't paying attention, trickle-down economics got respectable.

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#83. The idea that the business world's needs get ignored in Washington is perpetuated by business so it can fulfill even more of its needs, real or imagined.

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#84. Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from owning a gun. Seems like kind of a good idea, no?

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#85. The GOP doesn't seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.

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#86. Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.

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#87. GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.

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#88. Everyone agrees that animals should not be exposed to unnecessary pain. But neither should scientists be hamstrung by the requirement to use anesthesia in every animal experiment that might cause pain.

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#89. The worst an ex-con is likely to do if given the right to vote is vote for a Democrat.

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#90. Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.

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#91. One of the enduring mysteries of America's occupation of Iraq is why a nation that so little relishes peacekeeping nonetheless refuses to turn the job over to the United Nations.

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#92. President Obama seems to think that you win by demonstrating that you're a more reasonable person than your opponents. It didn't work too badly, I'll grant, as an electoral strategy in the 2012 election.

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#93. Romney has become reluctant to say that human activity causes global warming, and even in his greener days he was always somewhat cagey about which remedies he'd support.

Timothy Noah

#94. What type of 'person' is the for-profit corporation? A spoiled brat - all rights and no responsibilities, a traditional conservative argument would say.

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#95. Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

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#96. The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

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#97. Republicans don't seem to mind taking inflation into account when the subject is tax rates.

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#98. Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich's bidding.

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#99. Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.

Timothy Noah

#100. Under Obama, income growth has been confined almost entirely to those at the top of the income distribution, continuing a pattern that began under President George W. Bush.

Timothy Noah