Rachel Maddow famous quotes

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Imagination

If you have to hire paid actors to impersonate people who politically support you, people don`t actually natively politically support you. You are not a political animal that exists in nature.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Animal #People #Support

Gay people exist. There's nothing we can do in public policy that makes more of us exist, or less of us exist. And you guys have been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist, but you don't make any less of us exist. You just are arguing in favor of more discrimination, and more discrimination doesn't make straight people's lives any better.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Gay #People #Guy

Ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. That was the whole idea, right? That‘s why we went. I am reluctant to let that fact disappear down the memory hole, because if— as the war ends, or at least starts to end— if, at this time, the history of the war is written as us going there to topple the regime of a bad man when that frankly isn‘t why were told that we were going there— Aren‘t we still at risk of making this horrific mistake again? And, aren‘t we letting the people who foisted the WMD idea on us, not many years ago, aren‘t we sort of letting them get away with it?
-- Rachel Maddow

#Memories #War #Mistake

I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Party #Mean #Agreement

If you're someone people count on, particularly in difficult moments, that's a sign of a life lived honorably.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Inspiring #People #Moments

Hopefully life is long. Do stuff you will enjoy thinking about and telling stories about for many years to come. Do stuff you will want to brag about.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Inspirational #Graduation #Thinking

The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Honesty #Gay #Political

The single best thing about honesty is that it requires no follow-up.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Honesty #Follow Up

Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we don't believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Respect #Believe #Fall

My life is better with every year of living it.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Birthday #Years #Life Is

One of the manifestations of depression for me is that I lose my will. And I thereby lose my ability to focus. I don't think I'll ever have the day-to-day consistency in my performance that something like This American Life has. If I'm not depressed and I'm on and I can focus and I can think through something hard and without interruption and without existential emptiness that comes from depression, that gives me - not mania. But I exalt. I exalt in not being depressed.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Thinking #Giving #Focus

I'd rather have none at all than a grain too much.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Too Much #Grain

If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Military #Politics #Minutes

The American president just won the nobel peace prize, by any reasonable measure, all Americans should be proud
-- Rachel Maddow

#President #Proud #Should

I think a lot of people of my generation are discomfited by the assertion of neutrality in the mainstream media, this idea that they're the voice of God. I think it's just honest to say, yes, you know where I'm coming from but you can fact-check anything I say.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Thinking #Media #Ideas

after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war ... of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happened - war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.
-- Rachel Maddow

#War #Two #Empowering

There is no news value to the content of those [Newtown 911] tapes. The actual audio is of no news value at all, unless you want the thrill of hearing the sound of the actual individual gunshot that might have killed a 7 year-old.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Reality #Years #Justice

the American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars. While a tiny fraction of men and women fighting our wars are deploying again and again, civilian life remains pretty much isolated in cost-free complacency.
-- Rachel Maddow

#War #Fighting #Men

[To Timothy LaHaye:] So, Mr. LaHaye, when the Rapture happens, can I have your stuff?
-- Rachel Maddow

#Religion #Stuff #Rapture

When Ronald Reagan spoke a thing aloud, he believed it forever and for always. By the time he started running for president, in 1976, he had already developed an unwavering and steadfast faith in the correctness of whatever came out of his mouth.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Running #Forever #President

The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. ... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Country #Powerful #Military

if you want to achieve immortality, see what you can do about getting yourself turned into a Pentagon program.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Government #Want #Immortality

I have learned when two Republicans are talking about legalizing drugs to shut up.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Talking #Two #Drug

When Conservatives crusade against government while they are trying to be appointed to head the government, I think that's weird!
-- Rachel Maddow

#Thinking #Government #Trying

The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Beautiful #Hug #Spy

Pentagon dollars are essentially seen as a different kind of funding that doesn't have to stand for itself and make an argument for itself in the house of Congress.
-- Rachel Maddow

#House #Dollars #Different

People who disagree on important issues don't agree on the facts.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Issues #People #Important

I think that presidents don't give up power that has accrued to them by the precedent of previous presidents. Even when they say they would like to, I think once they get there they don't give it up.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Giving Up #Thinking

I loved being on the radio. Being paid to talk? It's like being paid to eat.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Radio

Internet's been down most of the day [at work]. Doing research by just asking everyone what we remember to be true. What could possibly go wrong?
-- Rachel Maddow

#Funny Inspirational #Research #Asking

we ought to realize by now (see Korea, see Vietnam, see Afghanistan, see Iraq, see Iran) that deploying the US military, or dealing billions of dollars a year of arms to our ally of the moment that can serve as a regional rival to our enemy of the moment, is not always the best way to make threats go away. Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer, but that doesn't make every international problem a nail.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Military #Iran #Korea

Abstinence-only education - the best STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) and pregnancy delivery system that politicians have ever devised.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Pregnancy #Stds #Disease

I feel that gay people not being able to get married for generations, forever, meant that we came up with alternative ways of recognizing relationships. And I worry that if everybody has access to the same institutions that we lose the creativity of subcultures having to make it on their own. And I like gay culture.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Creativity #Gay #Worry

You know just because you don't like the way it sounds when I say it or you don't like my haircut or you don't like that I'm gay, it does not mean that what we say is not true. If you squint a little bit, it is true I do sometimes look like a dude, and I am definitely gay.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Mean #Gay #Doe

Having a place out of the city is a shortcut toward the mental reset I need.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Cities #Shortcuts #Needs

After we graduate tonight, we no longer have to let society happen to us. We get to create our own.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Graduation #Tonight #Graduates

Military preparedness is absolutely a form of strength.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Military #Preparedness #Form

Social security isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s not bankrupting us. It’s not an outrage. It is working.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Social #Ponzi Scheme #Schemes

The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass. Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Fighting #Gun #America

If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you'd be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Talking #Levels #Pottery

Sarah Palin uses me as a laugh line in her stump speeches. If you're willing to turn me into a joke, you should also be willing to talk to me.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Laughing #Use #Lines

If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that's a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that's a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Accountability #Secret #Done

It's not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It's the big-ticket stuff too.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Littles #Stuff #Potatoes

It used to be that we disagreed over the basic facts we were fighting over, and we had different opinions about them. Now I think we accept different sources of authority. ... And people can establish credibility on their own say-so as long as nobody follows the trail and calls them out on it.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Fighting #Thinking #People

The folks celebrating Jim Bunning are seeing him as an anti-government, anti-spending activist. But to embrace Jim Bunning is to embrace a strange record, if you really are a libertarian, if you really are a deficit hawk, if you really care about spending and responsibility.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Responsibility #Government #Records

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a 'Public Safety Complex' around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Fire #Safety #Massachusetts

If the colonists hadn't rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn't exist.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Military #America #Maintaining

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Letters #Ephemera #Lots Of Friends

As proud and capable as it is, I think the idea that the military can build new countries is a tall order, and it's the sort of thing that we would only expect from a military that we have superresourced and thought of as supercapable.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Country #Military #Thinking

A handkerchief can never be put in another pocket after it has been in one pocket. I don't walk under ladders. I have items of clothing that are lucky for me. That rotates, but I am luck-oriented.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Luck #Ladders #Pockets

Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Rights

Sarah Palin is now the guy who hangs out in the high school parking lot, showing off his car, five years after he graduated.
-- Rachel Maddow

#School #Years #Car

I have a constitutional weakness in which I am very easily distracted by flashing lights. If there is a TV on in the room, I can't have a conversation with you. I won't eat, I won't sleep, I'll just meld with my couch.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Sleep #Light #Rooms

Gay people - generally speaking - have a responsibility to our own community and to future generations of gay people to come out, if and when we feel that we can.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Responsibility #Gay #Ifs And

I'm not a screamer. I'm confrontational, but I don't think that translates into anger.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Thinking #Translate

I don't think about people watching me on TV. I think it would stress me out.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Stress #Thinking #People

We have built something [a nuclear stockpile] bigger than we can drive.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Politics #Nuclear #Bigger

For the same work, dudes get paid more
-- Rachel Maddow

#Equal Pay #Equal

I'm a national security liberal, which I tell people because it's meant to sound absurd.
-- Rachel Maddow

#People #Sound #Absurd

I would like to be a polyglot.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Polyglots

I'm hopeless by e-mail, by phone, by text.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Phones #Mail #Hopeless

When it starts to seem like you have popped into bed with a specific party, it makes it difficult for people to believe you are not doing someone else's bidding for them.
-- Rachel Maddow

#Party #Believe #People