Matt Taibbi Quotes
-
Comparing your family budget to the sovereign debt of the United States is a little like comparing two kindergartners tossing a paper airplane to the Apollo 11 mission.
-
One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.
-
America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.
-
I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they're normal and can't be changed. A lot of what I write about is, 'Hey, you know, this stuff is really awful, and it doesn't need to be, and that's why it's so offensive.' Things should be better.
-
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.
-
The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.
-
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.
-
An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.
-
George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.
-
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.
-
There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.
-
The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't 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.
-
I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work.
-
Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.
-
What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides.
-
The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.
-
I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.
-
I actually never thought that Barack Obama was anything but a typical Democratic party politician, which to me meant that he was probably in bed with Wall Street.
-
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.
-
You might think otherwise, but it doesn't naturally follow that because a law has been passed by Congress and signed by the president, said law actually has to be implemented.
-
The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.
-
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
-
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.
-
We may be many things, we Americans, but we always get the job done.