Matt Taibbi famous quotes

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Apology #Player #Hands

Sniper is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.
-- Matt Taibbi

#War #Mind #Criticism

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Freedom #Greed #Liberty

The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Powerful #Blood #Squids

It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Safe #Financial #Compass

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Literacy #Slave #Reason

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will take our country back from everyone they disapprove of. But what they dont realize is, theres a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Meaningful #Country #Party

It's come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Views #Hands #Law

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Cutting #Successful #Profound

People are beginning to become disturbingly comfortable with a kind of official hypocrisy. Bizarrely, for instance, we've become numb to the idea that rights aren't absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Ideas #Rights #Hypocrisy

The joy of being a consumer is that it doesnt require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Responsibility #Self #Joy

Why is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Heat #Crime #Syndicate

'Nobody goes to jail.' This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Wall #Jail #Dollars

John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Men #Self #Skills

I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Iraq #News #Born

In the old days, when you took out a mortgage, it was probably through a local bank or a credit union, and whoever gave you your loan held on to it for life. If you lost your job or got too sick to work and suddenly had trouble making your payments, you could call a human being and work things out.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Jobs #Sick #Credit

Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Real #Mean #Choices

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Wall #Matter #Making Money

This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it.
-- Matt Taibbi

#America #Stealing #Get Away

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Opportunity #Animal #Order

In a pure capitalist system, an institution as moronic and corrupt as Bank of America would be swiftly punished by the market - the executives would get to loot their own firms once, then they'd be looking for jobs again.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Jobs #America #Would Be

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Crazy #Hands #Boxing

The problem with the Tea Party is that it's been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that's counter to their own interests.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Party #People #Tea

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Cutting #Organization #Giving

I mean, people who say that the Tea Party isn't a grassroots movement, I think, are incorrect. I think in some respects, it is a grassroots movement.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Party #Mean #Thinking

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Integrity #Greed #Democracy

To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Evil #Agents #Plight

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Tea #Racist #Would Be

When I heard the book (Thomas Friedman's latest) was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Book #Writing #Two

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Drama #Race #White

Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.
-- Matt Taibbi

#America #Russia #Insane

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Two #America

Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Thinking #Winning #Issues

One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Ideas #Issues #Long

Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Player #Nfl #Giving

In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Years #Land #Terrorist

In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Country #Thinking #Two

Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Father #Kids #People

I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Art #Educational #East

I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Growing Up #Kids #Hard Work

America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Country #America #Age

America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That's one of the things we're probably known for around the world, I would imagine.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Real #Passion #America

Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Way #Corruption #Construction

There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Wall #Thinking #Government

Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Agency #Together #Glue

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Average #Government #Tea

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Gambling #Fancy #Profit

The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.
-- Matt Taibbi

#People #Complicated #Subjects

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Nfl #Environmental #Problem

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Zero #Wall #Incentives

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.
-- Matt Taibbi

#Media #Trying #News