Rachel Maddow Quotes

The single best thing about honesty is that it requires no follow-up.

It is hard to know what Sarah Palin means in Republican politics anymore.

Flint and its lead contaminated water are now the focus of sustained national attention including political attention.

I'm in favor of outing when people have demonized or scapegoated gay people for their own public gain. When they have risen to public prominence on the backs of the gay community that they are part of and they prey on, I think that's absolutely deserving of outing.

When Conservatives crusade against government while they are trying to be appointed to head the government, I think that's weird!

I have a constitutional weakness in which I am very easily distracted by flashing lights. If there is a TV on in the room, I can't have a conversation with you. I won't eat, I won't sleep, I'll just meld with my couch.

Abstinence-only education - the best STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) and pregnancy delivery system that politicians have ever devised.

Formula 1 is a huge international phenomenon even if an otherwise car racing obsessed American public has always found Formula 1 to be a little weird.

I think service is honorable, and that was always inculcated in me.

There is no news value to the content of those [Newtown 911] tapes. The actual audio is of no news value at all, unless you want the thrill of hearing the sound of the actual individual gunshot that might have killed a 7 year-old.

John McCain has refused to ever criticize Sarah Palin, to ever admit there was anything wrong about her choice. He has been capital "L" loyal to her in such an unwavering way, even has his entire party has turned against this is decision that he made for obvious reasons. He has been unflinchingly loyal to her.

I like big drinks that aren't afraid of the alcohol in them. Not big in size, but in flavor, and the way I can allow myself to enjoy them is by making them in very small quantities. I make tiny glasses of very big drinks.

It is sometimes hard to know what Sarah Palin means, just on a day to day basis. Sometimes it is hard to follow what she is talking about.

People who disagree on important issues don't agree on the facts.

Donald Trump announced his no Muslims are allowed to come to the United States plan and that led to one of the greatest tweets of all time from New York Times columnist. Quote, "OK, I concede I picked the wrong day to modestly walk back my Trumpism as fascism column."

I loved being on the radio. Being paid to talk? It's like being paid to eat.

The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army ... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it.

Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed," wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. "While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait ... U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu. ... "Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit.

Six months after 9/11, Jean-Marie Le Pen was almost elected president of France. There were a number of leaders and a number of parties running in the French national elections that year in the spring of 2002. But it ended up being not just a shock across France, and not just a shock across Europe. But it ended up being almost a worldwide shock when in the spring of 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in those national elections. That put him in a two-man runoff for the presidency of France, spring of 2002.

Having a place out of the city is a shortcut toward the mental reset I need.

I wish every Republican wanted to impeach [Jeorge W.] Bush , but people don't agree with this. He's stating a fact about what he believes.

[Facism] that incredibly loaded word we do not associate with the real American politics is being used by other conservatives, by other Republicans to talk about Donald Trump.

I think that presidents don't give up power that has accrued to them by the precedent of previous presidents. Even when they say they would like to, I think once they get there they don't give it up.

And every year the Pentagon bite of the federal dollar got bigger and bigger. In Reagan's eight years in office, military expenditure doubled from around $150 billion to $300 billion a year, until it represented nearly 30 percent of our overall annual budget and more than 6 percent of GDP.

Congress has never since effectively asserted itself to stop a president with a bead on war. It was true of George Herbert Walker Bush. It was true of Bill Clinton. And by September 11, 2001, even if there had been real resistance to Vice President Cheney and President George W. Bush starting the next war (or two), there were no institutional barriers strong enough to have realistically stopped them. By 9/11, the war-making authority in the United States had become, for all intents and purposes, uncontested and unilateral: one man's decision to make. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

I'm sure other people in the business have considered reasons why they're doing what they're doing, but I do think that if you're gay you have a responsibility to come out.

Who knows if John McCain could have won that presidential campaign [2008] in any circumstances when George W. Bush the outgoing Republican president had a 22 percent approval rating.

" [Donald] Trump may indeed be a little fascistic."New York Times wrote.

The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway.

Gay people exist. There's nothing we can do in public policy that makes more of us exist, or less of us exist. And you guys have been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist, but you don't make any less of us exist. You just are arguing in favor of more discrimination, and more discrimination doesn't make straight people's lives any better.

I don't think vodka is useful. I think it's for people who don't like alcohol, in which case, you probably shouldn't be drinking it.

It's easy to look back on those strange days at the end of September 2003 and identify the warnings signs about Putin and Russia that American policy makers missed. But it would be unfair to them, and unfair to history, to do so without recognizing that the way things turned out was not inevitable. There really was the spore of a bright, new future in 2003, and it is certainly true that Russia itself had the resources and the capability to go in another direction. That things turned out as they did is a tragedy, a sprawling but explicable tragedy. And it is not Russia's alone.

Bernie Sanders are the only person who talks about the kinds of things that might be driving people to support Donald Trump in such large numbers in the Republican Party.

It's not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It's the big-ticket stuff too.

By the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001, an Operation Other Than War, as Pentagon forces called them, could go on indefinitely, sort of on autopilot - without real political costs or consequences, or much civilian notice. We'd gotten used to it.
By 2001, the ability of a president to start and wage military operations without (or even in spite of) Congress was established precedent.

We do not need to endorse that [agains Muslims]type of activity nor should we.

Liberals say that we are secular country with a majority of Christians, absolutely.

John McCain from the very beginning has been unflinchingly loyal to Sarah Palin. He has never thrown her under the bus. He has never conceded it was a bad decision to pick her. He has never ever said a bad word against her.

I recommend sports, I don't recommend gambling.

Those policies [of Jean-Marie Le Pen ]I find repellent. I believe many people right across consist the world do. There is no future in that type of narrow minded racism and nationalism.

Overall, the United States admits to having lost track of eleven nuclear bombs over the years. I

So this is the only TV show in America where I am quite confident that you, the audience, will share my excitement when I tell you that coming up in our next segment, we have the best graph ever. Best graph ever.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, "Detail in History." But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics.

"Red Dawn" was a movie made in 1984 I think about World War III. If you have not seen it and plan on watching it, you want to close your eye and cover your ears but not really. You can figure it out.

At a time when America should be doing everything we can to lead the fight to defeat ISIS and other radical jihadists, Donald Trump is playing right into their hands.

Pentagon dollars are essentially seen as a different kind of funding that doesn't have to stand for itself and make an argument for itself in the house of Congress.

Military preparedness is absolutely a form of strength.

One of the manifestations of depression for me is that I lose my will. And I thereby lose my ability to focus. I don't think I'll ever have the day-to-day consistency in my performance that something like This American Life has. If I'm not depressed and I'm on and I can focus and I can think through something hard and without interruption and without existential emptiness that comes from depression, that gives me - not mania. But I exalt. I exalt in not being depressed.

The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them.

If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you'd be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here.

If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that's a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that's a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public.

If you're someone people count on, particularly in difficult moments, that's a sign of a life lived honorably.

I have this belief that Donald Trump keeps floating the idea that he will quit the party and run as an independent if the Republican Party does not treat him fairly.

Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we don't believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst.

You may never have heard of Joseph Overton and his proverbial window but you most certainly have heard the Republican presidential campaign in 2015 year not just flinging the window open but shattering all its glass.

My life is better with every year of living it.

In 1981, and 1983, and every year thereafter, right around budget time, the Pentagon released its newest installment of Soviet Military Power to the public,

It used to be that we disagreed over the basic facts we were fighting over, and we had different opinions about them. Now I think we accept different sources of authority ... And people can establish credibility on their own say-so as long as nobody follows the trail and calls them out on it.

Famously in 1936, Oswald Mosley led a march of his British black shirts through a mostly Jewish neighborhood, in the east end of London. What resulted was what they called the "Battle of Cable Street", where Oswald Mosley and his fascists basically got the snot beaten out of them when East London rose up against them and beat them up.

I am too old to know how to put a naked photograph of myself on the Internet.

I think a lot of people of my generation are discomfited by the assertion of neutrality in the mainstream media, this idea that they're the voice of God. I think it's just honest to say, yes, you know where I'm coming from but you can fact-check anything I say.

The thing about rights is they're not actually supposed to be voted on. That's why they're called rights.

Sarah Palin uses me as a laugh line in her stump speeches. If you're willing to turn me into a joke, you should also be willing to talk to me.

If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later.

The downside of playing dumb is that you sound dumb.

I feel that gay people not being able to get married for generations, forever, meant that we came up with alternative ways of recognizing relationships. And I worry that if everybody has access to the same institutions that we lose the creativity of subcultures having to make it on their own. And I like gay culture.

If you want to make the government take a religious side, then make the case, it should be Christian republic.

I'm a sarcastic person. I learn through humor.

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter ... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us ... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

The umbrella assertion made by Team B - and the most inflammatory - was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates "substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat." Soviet military leaders weren't simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this "grave and dangerous flaw" in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay "the large body of soft data." This "soft" data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included "his deep knowledge of the Russian soul.

I will say that Bernie Sanders are the opposite end of the spectrum from Donald Trump. We see him leading right now in the Republican Party in an intractable way.

The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine - guns get a pass.
Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.

As proud and capable as it is, I think the idea that the military can build new countries is a tall order, and it's the sort of thing that we would only expect from a military that we have superresourced and thought of as supercapable.

Well, they got caught of course. The whole thing was so dunderheaded, how could they not? By November 1986, Reagan's "Secret Dealings with Iran" had supplanted the 1986 midterm election results on the front page of Time magazine.

We never had an effect well-organized national fascist party in this country. The way they want have had in decades past and in decades present in countries like Britain and France that we think of as such close allies.

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a 'Public Safety Complex' around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station.

By 2001, even the peacetime US military budget was well over half the size of all other military budgets in the world combined.

I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.

What's insulting to the American people, the Senate, to this whole process is that the Republicans, with all other nominees, have said Democrats are being obstructionist for wanting to see documents, for wanting to see a paper trail, for wanting to get questions answered in the judiciary committee hearings, and now all of a sudden, the Republicans want those things for this.

We have built something [a nuclear stockpile] bigger than we can drive.

Every popular zillion dollar sport has its share of personal scandals around the sport and its leadership.

I'm not a screamer. I'm confrontational, but I don't think that translates into anger.

I would like to be a polyglot.

Feminism is itself a challenge. Feminism is a challenge to the way things are in the world. It is by definition an oppositional movement, because it's trying to accomplish something. I've never felt like feminism was a consciousness raising effort in isolation. Everything about feminism is about getting something in the world to get better for women, and to get the world to be less stupid on gender bifurcation terms. I think that feminism over time gets better, or it gets better and worse and better and worse at achieving the goals that it's trying to achieve, but the overall mission stays the same. I guess I don't think of it as feminism versus anti-feminism; I sort of think of it as feminism versus the world. I don't think of it as a competition; there's no winning. In feminism, you're always trying to make stuff better. It's opposition to which you cannot attribute a tally.

The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure ... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong.

I still think of myself as the new kid, even though I've been on the air for two and a half years. But my job is the same as it ever was, which is to make 9:00 P.M. as good as I can.

We ought to realize by now (see Korea, see Vietnam, see Afghanistan, see Iraq, see Iran) that deploying the US military, or dealing billions of dollars a year of arms to our ally of the moment that can serve as a regional rival to our enemy of the moment, is not always the best way to make threats go away. Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer, but that doesn't make every international problem a nail.

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS.

Reagan and his growing right-wing "truth" machine had stirred public opinion to such a frothy head that Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker was warned that a vote for the treaty would cost him any chance at the GOP presidential nomination in 1980. On the way to the Senate floor to cast his aye vote, a popular centrist Democrat from New Hampshire asked his wife to "come on and watch me lose my seat

The American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars. While a tiny fraction of men and women fighting our wars are deploying again and again, civilian life remains pretty much isolated in cost-free complacency.

This isn't a partisan thing - constitutionalists left and right have equal reason to worry over the lost constraint on the executive. Republicans and Democrats alike have options to vote people into Congress who are determined to stop with the chickenshittery and assert the legislature's constitutional prerogatives on war and peace.

[To Timothy LaHaye:] So, Mr. LaHaye, when the Rapture happens, can I have your stuff?

The report made a science fiction-like case that the president was within his constitutional rights to reinterpret congressional legislation to conform more closely to his own desires, or to simply refuse to carry out laws with which he did not agree, or that, the report harrumphed, "unconstitutionally encroach on the executive branch." In sum, anything the president doesn't want to do he doesn't have to do; anything he wants to do, consider it done.