Timothy Noah Quotes

The Reagan years really were a bonanza for the rich; you didn't imagine that.

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

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.'

Romney has become reluctant to say that human activity causes global warming, and even in his greener days he was always somewhat cagey about which remedies he'd support.

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

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.

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

Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn't. It's just hiding behind a call center in Manila.

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

Gun Owners of America is a lobby group dedicated to the proposition that the National Rifle Association is a bunch of accommodationist sissies.

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.

The Sudan bombing is a blot on the Clinton presidency, and a blot it ought to remain.

Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.

I've come to the conclusion that the government needs to impose price controls on tuition increases - and so, I think, has President Obama.

The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet.

President Obama seems to think that you win by demonstrating that you're a more reasonable person than your opponents. It didn't work too badly, I'll grant, as an electoral strategy in the 2012 election.

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

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

If one does not wish to take the word of journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations that Iraq conducted a deliberate campaign to eradicate the Kurdish population, there's always the word of the Iraqis themselves.

Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word.

The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.

If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court wishes us to believe, they are stunningly unpatriotic ones.

Presidential election results in 2008 and 2012 clarified that talk radio was not, in fact, running the country.

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

If the 1992 and 2000 elections were any guide, third-party candidates are death on the mainstream parties with which they're most naturally aligned.

The thing to strive for is to get paid to talk about yourself.

I'm all for lifting the payroll-tax cap, if only to make payroll taxes a little less regressive.

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

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

The problem with wanting the tax code to be 'simpler, fairer,' and 'pro-growth' is that it's impossible to achieve all three at the same time.

Income inequality has gotten worse under President Barack Obama.

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

Expressing truth is hard work.

To cut the federal budget without cutting entitlements is like giving up chocolate-chip cookies and then deciding it's OK to eat the ones that don't have any nuts.

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

The typical family of four with employer-based health insurance is not the same as the typical family of four. It's better-off.

Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands.

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

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.

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.

The Bush administration got a lot of things horribly wrong in its disaster response to the New Orleans flood, and it deserves almost all of the bitter recriminations hurled its way.

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.

I'd never have guessed that, six years after Medicare introduced a drug benefit, it would still be forbidden to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. Health reform might fix that, but it probably won't.

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.

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

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.

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

When a conservative praises a liberal as 'morally serious,' he means that person is less liberal than most.

What people want is big government that they don't have to pay for.

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

The Supreme Court needs jurists, not politicians.

It never fails to astonish me how cheaply a politician can be bought.

Everyone agrees that animals should not be exposed to unnecessary pain. But neither should scientists be hamstrung by the requirement to use anesthesia in every animal experiment that might cause pain.

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

The intriguing aspect of food charges on airlines is that they create the perfect laboratory for any economist who wishes to study the question of how to price a good that possesses, by universal consensus, absolutely no objective value.

You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.

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.

The financial services industry is a ward of the state.

In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

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

Voters care only that student loans remain freely available and that they cost taxpayers as little as possible.

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.'

Without the three-fifths rule, there wouldn't have been a Constitution of the United States - not one that governed the American South, at any rate - because the South wouldn't have ratified it.

Washington culture has always had a difficult time acknowledging untruth.

The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.

Republicans don't seem to mind taking inflation into account when the subject is tax rates.

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.

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

Was President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage crassly political? God, I hope so.

I recognize that Republicans see a moral difference between a dollar taken away from a millionaire in government benefits and a dollar taken away from a millionaire in taxes.

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.

You have to let the market reward effort and skill. But a system in which inequality of incomes constantly increases over time is worrisome.

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

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

There is quite a lot of mutual misunderstanding between the upper middle class and the working class. Reviewing what's been said about the white working class and the Democrats, I realized that there's even a lot of disagreement about who the working class IS.

I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

The federal government does not trample in jackboots those with whom it does business. It wraps them in cotton batting and, when they express ingratitude, apologizes profusely.

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.

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

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

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.

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

The GOP doesn't seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.

The chief purpose of a union is to maximize the income of its members.

The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.

Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from owning a gun. Seems like kind of a good idea, no?

The fallacy is that politicians don't really do much about social issues. They just demonize their opponents as elitists and reap the benefit. It's a stupid way to do politics. Economic issues can more often be addressed concretely, and it would seem logical for people to vote their interests in this area.

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 gulf between Virginia and Maryland isn't only a function of geography. It's also sociological. Indeed, it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that Maryland suburbanites and Virginia suburbanites constitute two mutually hostile tribes.

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

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

Right now, as I'm typing this, some liberal somewhere is saying something unforgivable about Michelle Bachmann or Ann Coulter. I condemn you, whoever you are! But I'm not going to conduct a house-to-house search to find you.

Capitalism can't deliver decent health care.

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

Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.

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.

Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.