Molly Ivins Quotes
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I often plagiarize from myself. I like to think of this as ecological journalism: I recycle.
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Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.
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If you ever get to the place where injustice doesn't bother you, you're dead.
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It's all very well to run around saying regulation is bad, get the government off our backs, etc. Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersections, no fish and no ducks. OK?
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The first rule of holes: When you're in one stop digging.
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On Bill Clinton: "If left to my own devices, I'd spend all my time pointing out that he's weaker than bus-station chili. But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied. Besides, no one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal.
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I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.
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How the American right managed to convince itself that the programs to alleviate poverty are responsible for the consequences of poverty will someday be studied as a notorious mass illusion.
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The Founders were right all along, but the results are a lot funnier than they intended.
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Of course, it has never paid much.
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Conservatives are fond of pointing out there are problems in this world can't be solved by throwing money at them. There are even more that can't be solved by dropping bombs on them.
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In Texas, we do not hold high expectations for the governor's office; it's mostly been occupied by crooks, dorks and the comatose.
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If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day.
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Texas liberals are the camels of good news. We can cross entire deserts between oases.
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I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.
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...you could have knocked me over with Michael Huffington's brain.
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Texas is not a civilized place. Texans shoot one another a lot. They also knife, razor, and stomp one another to death with some frequency. And they fight in bars all the time.
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I never saw anything funnier than Texas politics.
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The myth of the inevitability of economic globalization is based largely on the work of Milton Friedman, and easily the most underreported story of our time is that the current economy proves Friedman flatly wrong.
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Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal - fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed.
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California is now close to spending more on prisons than it does on higher education - surely the death warrant of a civilization.
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You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit.
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With politicians, artful evasion is always preferable to the outright lie.
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the pyramids were built for pharaohs on the happy theory that they could take their stuff with them. Versailles was built for kings on the theory that they should live surrounded by the finest stuff. The Mall of America is built on the premise that we should all be able to afford this stuff. It may be a shallow culture, but it's by-God democratic. Sneer if you dare; this is something new in world history.