Molly Ivins Quotes
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Personally, I think government is a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build or you can use a hammer to destroy; there is nothing intrinsically good or evil about the hammer itself. It is the purposes to which it is put and the skill with which it is used that determine whether the hammer's work is good or bad.
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Economist Frederick Thayer has studied the history of our balanced-budget crusades and has come up with some depressing statistics. We have had six major depressions in our history (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929); all six of them followed sustained periods of reducing the national debt. We have had almost chronic deficits since the 1930s, and there has been no depression since then - the longest crash-free period in our history.
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I don't so much mind that newspapers are dying - it's watching them commit suicide that pisses me off.
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It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.
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Some days, I'd feel better with Punxsutawney Phil in the Oval Office - at least he doesn't lie about the weather.
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I know vegetarians don't like to hear this, but God made an awful lot of land that's good for nothing but grazing.
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Either we figure out how to keep corporate cash out of the political system or we lose the democracy.
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When Michael Jackson, a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich, white woman, married Elvis Presley's daughter the Scientologist. Makes you proud to be an American, dudn't it?
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It's hard to convince people that you're killing them for their own good.
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The more a body tries to explode all the foolish myths that have grown up about Texas by telling the truth, the more a body will wind up adding to the mythology.
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If you really wanted to settle down the Middle East, if what you wanted was change in the Middle East, it is perfectly obvious that the first step is resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
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Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory.
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As for George Bush of Kennebunkport, Maine- personally I think he's further evidence that the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky has an overdeveloped sense of irony.
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The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children's blood.
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It is quite reasonable to subscribe both to the old saw that no good girl was ever ruined by a book and to the perception that it is not good for children to be constantly exposed to the sexual violence in our popular culture. Protecting children seems to me logically, legally, and rather easily differentiated from censorship.
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Humanism is not alive and well in Texas. Different colors and types of Texans do not like one another, nor do they pretend to.
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Good thing we've still got politics in Texas - finest form of free entertainment ever invented.
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The impulse to make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free is an old one ... When we are badly frightened, we think we can make ourselves safer by sacrificing some of our liberties. We did it during the McCarthy era out of fear of communism. Less liberty is regularly proposed as a solution to crime, to pornography, to illegal immigration, to abortion, to all kinds of threats.
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Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, "Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked.
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You look at the large problems that we face - that would be overpopulation, water shortages, global warming and AIDS, I suppose - all of that needs international cooperation to be solved.
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I think most of us become nicer as we get older, less judgmental, less full of certitude; life tends to knock a few corners of us as we go through. Cancer, divorce, teenagers, and other plagues make us give up on expecting ourselves - or life - to be perfect, which is a real relief.
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We've had trickle down economics in the country for ten years now, and most of us aren't even damp yet.
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Freedom fighters don't always win, but they're always right.
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Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided me the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life.