Top 40 Gail Collins Quotes

There have been tons of politicians who were slow to accept equal rights when it meant changes in the established social order. Many eventually came around, admitted they were wrong, and were forgiven. But the ones who actively choose hate-mongering don’t ever get a pass.

You know what Americans are really sensitive to? Issues of fairness. I think this is a modern phenomenon, born of the civil rights movement. Once you convince Americans that something is basically unfair, you’ve got a winning cause.

I don’t think the folks in the low-tax states really want to go into a fairness discussion. Residents of Connecticut and New York would love to remind them how much they pay in federal taxes to support programs for Mississippi and South Dakota.

I used to have a sort of soft spot for Huckabee. He seemed to have a genuinely saintly streak, which caused him to defend illegal immigrants and give pardons to criminals who were perhaps a little less rehabilitated than he had imagined.

Illegal immigration can never be completely stopped, no matter how high the wall or how many patrol agents you have watching it.

Texas is a great place to be rich and a terrible place to be poor. It’s got the highest percentage of people without health insurance in the country. If you get injured on the job, good luck getting workers’ comp. And God help you if you’re poor and mentally ill.

The whole student loan thing drives me completely nuts. If it wasn’t possible for 18-year-olds to sign themselves up for tens of thousands of dollars in debt in order to pay their college bills, the state governments wouldn’t have found it so politically easy to cut taxpayer support for public colleges and universities.

Hillary Clinton almost got to be president. The reasons why she didn’t become president had to do with bad judgments about how to handle the early caucus states, which is not a gender-specific trait.

Can I say that I think it should be against the law for one state to use taxpayer money to try to bribe businesses in another state to move? Which then causes the target state to use taxpayer dollars to try to bribe the businesses to stay.

The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.

The idea that ‘if you don’t like how things are going, you can just leave’ is so ingrained in Texas, the secession movement is no surprise.

For a border state, I would argue that Texas is less lunatic on the subject of immigration issues than other places around it, like Arizona. They’re much more comfortable with their long-term identity as a place with a very large Hispanic population.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It’s just great to let other people carry the narrative.

One line I’d draw would be on raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare. It sounds fair, since people are living longer. But it isn’t. Lower income workers are the ones who find it hardest to keep working after 65. And they’ll get penalized with lower benefits.

Women in America will have to find an answer for the pressures of work and family, but if you really care about women’s issues you have to think about women in the world, especially Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

One very clear memory I have of college is that I never learned anything in the big lectures. I have a feeling I’d have done even worse if they’d been on a laptop screen.

I used to like John McCain, too, but I must admit that was because he was bucking his party to do things I agreed with. I would not have had that reaction if, say, Bernie Sanders decided to rebel out of principle and support privatizing Social Security.

When the women’s movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the ’60s besides a women’s movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.

Certainly Nancy Reagan had an extraordinary effect on her husband. I’m truly not sure that, say, Laura Bush had that much effect on the Bush administration. She certainly, you know, seems to be a nice person who I think the public likes. But I can’t really put my finger on any huge impact she’s had.

Gay rights is just a matter of time. Look at the polls. Worrying about gay marriage, let alone gay civil unions or gay employment rights, is a middle-age issue. Young people just can’t see the problem. At worst, gays are going to win this one just by waiting until the opposition dies off.

The high point was that the people are really nice – despite the crazy politics – and I loved being there. The hardest part was knowing some of the things I was probably going to write about Texas would make those nice people very unhappy.

There’s always been that theory that if a candidate can’t run a decent campaign, he probably can’t run a decent presidency. That might be true, although sadly I must admit that running a brilliant campaign does not translate into running a brilliant White House.

I picked up my college copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I’d underlined. The answer was basically: everything.

I’m being driven crazy by people who are obsessed with limiting the scope of government, but feel perfectly free to demand that government get involved in women’s most personal choices.

You hear younger women say, ‘I don’t believe I’m a feminist. I believe women should have equal right and I believe in fighting for the rights of other women, but I’m certainly not a feminist. No, no, not that!’ It’s just a word. If you called it ‘Fred’ would it be better?

When I started giving talks about women’s history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, ‘Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.’ It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point.

When the simple word processors came in, writing became crisper, less dense – just because of the way we could instantly edit on the screen. Now the ability to mash up words and pictures and links and songs and tweets is what matters. I can’t imagine what writing will be like in 2154.

The fantasy I’ve always had is that somehow I could move back in time. I would like to be there when Susan B. Anthony was dying, or someone like that. I would say to her, ‘You won’t believe what’s going to happen.’ And then I would tell her.

At the beginning of his administration, Obama homed right in on Medicare, which he wanted to fix by reducing the overall cost of health care in this country. He risked everything – some would claim he lost everything – by being so single-minded.

I think voters want somebody who understands their problems. You’re right that they don’t expect the president to fix everything. When he’s wrestling with Congress and Wall Street and the rest of the world, they hope he’ll be looking at things from their vantage point.

I just really like Houston despite its craziness. There is a sense of energy and a kind of excitement, ‘We’re going places and God knows what’ll happen next.’ It’s very interesting. It’s very exciting.

I kind of think that if you show conspiracy theorists a photo of the dead Bin Laden they will come up with an explanation for why it’s really a Photoshopped picture of Bin Laden asleep. Or his dead cousin Fred. Donald Trump apparently believes that Bin Laden is dead, so that ought to be enough for the Middle East.

Take Hispanic voters. They favor Democrats because they like the party’s programs, from health care reform to government spending on education. It’s not because the Republicans don’t have a big enough Office of Hispanic Outreach.

My own dream is that we discover that the NSA has been secretly keeping files on members of the National Rifle Association.

Elections have to have at least a little meaning. Obama ran on income tax hikes for the wealthy. People knew they were voting for that. They ‘want’ that. And it’s good policy.

I did some research once on the way people in the past imagined the year 2000. They tended to picture the things they already had getting more sophisticated – flying cars, self-cleaning windows. And the folks in the early 1900s had a wildly optimistic estimate of the future of pneumatic tubes.

Natural Texas politicians make terrible, terrible presidential candidates. Phil Gramm, I remember the ‘Phil Gramm for President’ campaign. I thought that was the worst thing in the history of the world, but Rick Perry was possibly worse.

Sarah Palin is treated like a bimbo sometimes, but she has never given the public the respect they deserve. She acts silly and doesn’t know stuff. She didn’t even finish her term.

There are competing studies on how much crime drops or doesn’t drop when there are strict rules on gun possession and sale. I don’t think there’s any question that New York City’s very tough laws have reduced violence.

Whenever you bring up women’s internal workings, guys want to change the subject. Unless, of course, they’re trying to change the laws.