Rachel Maddow Quotes

Robert Rice “Build a Wall” Reynolds lost his seat in the U.S. Senate and so did Gerald Nye.

Not all Freudian slips are created equal.

When Pat is saying something outrageous, you know when you yell at the TV? I get to yell at him in person. I get to yell at the TV and it hears me.

I spent the weekend curled up with the Marine Corps and Army counterinsurgency field manual—because that's how I roll on the weekends.

And it is like -50 degrees in that Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed the power in Fargo today? Alright. What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux Falls just poofed on the coldest in recent memory and it wasn't in our power whether or not to turn them back on? What would you do if you lost heat indefinitely as the act of a foreign power on the same that the temperature matched the temperature in Antarctica? What would you and your family do?

The oil and gas industry — left to its own devices — will mindlessly follow its own nature. It will make tons of money. It will corrode and corrupt and sabotage democratic governance. It will screw up and — in the end — fatally injure the whole freaking planet. And yes, it will also provide oil and gas along the way! And jobs for the workers who produce those things for it. The end-times battle that we’re engaged in now is to figure out how to get along without oil and gas — and we’re plugging away but still a ways off from that — and, in the meantime, commit to a whole new level of constraint and regulatory protection against this singularly destructive industry to minimize its potential harms.

But somehow Carter’s “battlefield of energy” never really filled up with eager American combatants. It just never felt like anybody was going to be draped in glory for taking public transportation, or carpooling, or turning down the thermostat and wearing a cardigan.

The country, meanwhile, has eroded into a stultifying economic sinkhole for average Russians. “Despite receiving $1.6 trillion from oil and gas exports from 2000 to 2011, Russia was not able to build a single multi-lane highway during this time. There is still no interstate highway linking Moscow to the Far East,” Karen Dawisha wrote in her richly detailed 2014 book, Putin’s Kleptocracy.

The fight here at home in the 1930s and 1940s is a story of American politics at the edge: a violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships, with detailed plans to overthrow the U.S. government, and even with former American military officers who stood ready to lead.

The fascists in attendance complained about being called Nazis. The outright Nazis sporting swastika tattoos said they were a little hurt by that.

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.

The really disheartening thing, to Sevareid, was that his series seemed to increase the number of locals who sympathized with Pelley’s adherents.

You want to know what just happened there? She smacked me down - smacked me down: "But Speaker Pelosi, the Republicans are all over the TV machine opposing the economic stimulus." "Settle down, kid. It‘s not working." Duh. Maybe she‘s right. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal sort of put the punctuation mark on Speaker Pelosi‘s point about Republicans on TV with his response to the not state-of-the-union last night.

In the lead-up to World War II, the U.S. Congress was rife with treachery, deceit, and almost unfathomable actions on the part of people who had sworn to defend the Constitution but who instead got themselves implicated in a plot to end it.

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.