Top 80 Timothy Noah Quotes

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot – too much, in retrospect – about the rich.

When the topic is growing income inequality, it’s hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead, conservatives try to argue that it doesn’t exist.

The U.S. policy of hoarding crude oil never made the world, or even the U.S., a safer place.

When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened ‘the Reagan.’

We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.

What I’ve learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country’s credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect ‘aptronyms’ – the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams’s term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.

Bottom line: A market approach to national defense would give us a lousy national defense.

One of the enduring mysteries of America’s occupation of Iraq is why a nation that so little relishes peacekeeping nonetheless refuses to turn the job over to the United Nations.

Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington – the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city’s avatars of centrism and continuity – Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.

There’s no shortage of Democrats who are at least as committed as Schwarzenegger to reducing greenhouse gases.

Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure.

What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university.

We Americans love our Constitution so much that we can’t bear to change even the stupid parts.

In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.

Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I’m glad to live in a capitalist country.

On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.

Why does Medicare have such difficulty accommodating a cut – no, wait, a trim to its annual spending increase – of two measly percentage points? Two words: baby boom.

Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich’s bidding.

For any politician who didn’t enter office a wealthy man, nothing says ‘I take bribes’ like a Rolex watch.

Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins – its own and everybody else’s. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.

Washington is a place where politics and economics often aren’t on speaking terms.

The idea that the business world’s needs get ignored in Washington is perpetuated by business so it can fulfill even more of its needs, real or imagined.

What the 1990s taught the Clinton veterans was that you could ‘triangulate’ with a GOP-controlled Congress.

If the Pentagon truly confined itself to providing defense, then presumably we wouldn’t need a whole separate government agency to provide ‘Homeland Security.’

Washington culture has always had a difficult time acknowledging untruth.

The worst an ex-con is likely to do if given the right to vote is vote for a Democrat.

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.

I’m an incompetent consumer. I have two settings: Buy and Don’t Buy.

Politicians have such large egos that it usually takes them an inordinately long time to grasp when they’ve become a pathetic joke.

The war to rein in Wall Street excess is never over.

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.

Creativity seldom thrives in an atmosphere of great discipline or scrutiny. That’s one reason we tend not to want our leaders to get too creative.

One can imagine nonviolent or minimally violent ways to reduce or eliminate hatred, but there’s no mollifying evil.

When businesses affirmatively like regulations, that’s when to reach for your wallet.

What type of ‘person’ is the for-profit corporation? A spoiled brat – all rights and no responsibilities, a traditional conservative argument would say.

With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.

With its Medicaid expansion, Obamacare may turn out to be the most equality-promoting policy enacted in a generation.

GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren’t even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.

Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don’t acquire wisdom from it.

In removing the friction involved in paying bills, electronic billing has substantially increased the friction involved in not paying them.

The advantage of a market-based national defense is obvious: Every citizen would receive an individualized amount of military protection, based on the value each of us placed on defending the homeland.

Universities are basically socialist institutions.

The only agency of the federal government with a more demoralized workforce than Homeland Security is the Small Business Administration, a notorious turkey farm that should have been abolished years ago.

There’s a growing consensus that the best way to defeat communism in Cuba is to get its citizens hooked on American goods.

An orthodox belief in big government’s inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry’s inability to compete with big government.

The Supreme Court needs jurists, not politicians.

Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford’s.

The embourgeoisement of China’s proletariat may be the inevitable result of its industrialization, but ‘inevitable’ isn’t the same as ‘speedy.’

What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can’t possibly be enough.

The $100 bill may be America’s most successful export.

The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.

Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that’s codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

We live in a diverse nation, but it isn’t that diverse. If any one state showed results so dramatically different from the results in each of the other 50 states, the likeliest explanation would be that someone had tampered with the polls.

You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn’t have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas.

The argument most commonly made in the filibuster’s favor is crudely partisan: ‘Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we’ll want to block the other side’s extremist agenda.’

Deciding which ideas to save and which ideas to discard is one of society’s most important tasks.

Vote Republican if you like, but don’t kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all.

President Obama has his faults, but overall, I think, is a good president.

Rule of thumb: When Democrats lose, they blame the candidate. When Republicans lose, they blame the opposition.

The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.

The hometown economic elite – rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly – disappeared from most American cities decades ago.

Just about everything I own was made in China. Just about everything you own was made in China, too.

Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He’s a liar. He’s an apologist for corrupt regimes.

Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

Whenever a president nominates somebody to a high-profile post, there is always the risk that some skeleton, real or imagined, will emerge from the nominee’s closet and doom the whole enterprise.