Matt Taibbi Quotes

It's so pathetically easy to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense,

More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It's the rest of us who are lost.

I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new.

I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work.

Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues.

At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing.

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

I mean, people who say that the Tea Party isn't a grassroots movement, I think, are incorrect. I think in some respects, it is a grassroots movement.

America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.

As for the rest of them, God help us. Trump's continued success puts the onus on the field to try to out-crazy the frontrunner.

How Giuliani is not Trump's running mate no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate love story since Beavis and Butthead.

One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.

Yes, let's build a wall, but let's do it to help African-Americans! It's alt-right meets Civil Rights! The best crossover hit since "Walk This Way"!

More and more often, we all make silent calculations about who is entitled to what rights, and who is not.

Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.

America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show. And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.

America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That's one of the things we're probably known for around the world, I would imagine.

It may not seem funny now, because it's happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.

Say as little as possible, hope some of the undecideds like your teeth better than the other guy's - that's usually the way this business works.

Get your liver ready: the second GOP debate is upon us S

In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years.

I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.

Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.

Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.

Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.

TV is the ultimate leveling phenomenon. It makes everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality. That

Intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Curiously, for instance, the drop in violent crime is most pronounced in cities with high immigrant populations.

Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end.

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.

I get the cynicism thing all the time, although I don't really know where that comes from, because I think I'm actually the opposite of a cynic.

This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it.

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.

I think America has the best assholes in the world. I defy the Belgians or the Japanese to produce something like a Donald Trump.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.

The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski should be herded into a rocket and shot into space for their brown-nosing of Trump A

Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way.

Why is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate.

Wall Street crime, in part, is a confidence game in which the criminal justice system itself is the mark.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.

We may be many things, we Americans, but we always get the job done.

Lenders to trade their long-term income streams for short-term cash. Say

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

The notion of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

Too-big-to-fail, meet small-enough-to-jail.

The problem with the Tea Party is that it's been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that's counter to their own interests.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life.

Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.

Ironically, the very brokest people in America, Hispanic immigrants, are one of America's last great cash crops.

Gross Domestic Product - the substitution, in effect, of ideas for physical value.