Rachel Maddow Quotes

So best of luck to the Sea Shadow and its disguise-me ship, which I have to say are the most adorable multimillion dollar bits of scrap heap-bound Cold War ephemera that we have seen in a long time.

Calvin Coolidge in 1924 had signed into law radical restrictions on immigration, but not before publishing a stinging little essay in Good Housekeeping magazine titled “Whose Country Is This?” Immigration restrictions, Coolidge wrote under the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, were a necessary first step in walling off white America from “the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless or the improvident.” These types, he implied, could be identified by nationality and skin color. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. The unassimilated alien child menaces our children.

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.

Here’s the crux of the matter. Oil and gas companies do the kind of risky, capital-intensive work that the average Joe, the average mom-and-pop business, even the average country, doesn’t do for itself. In so doing, they can make a spectacular pile of money, but they can also make a tremendous amount of mess. And ruin. And even catastrophic, polluting apocalypse, when they really put their shoulder into it. But they are also big enough and hold enough sway that even big powerful governments tend to defer to them when it comes to how to best police their behavior.

One big appeal of fascism, if nothing else, was its unapologetic embrace of cruelty. Cruelty toward others, coupled with hypersensitivity toward any slight to oneself.

Accuracy just never really captured the expansiveness of his vision, or the arc of a good story well told.

The bomb exploded the junk in Vladimir's trunk. Y'know, they always said that Communists would get it in the end.

The Biden administration today announced that as of today, we have crossed an important threshold. As of today, a majority of U.S. seniors have been vaccinated. We have hit 50 percent of all Americans aged 65 and up have been vaccinated. Just a remarkable threshold.

No doubt Agnew felt it helped his cause to get that little bit of fiction out there again in 1980. But he had made a critical error at a critical time. By writing about the conversation with White, Agnew had waived any attorney-client privilege that protected exchanges with his lawyer. And that mistake was a very big reason why Spiro Agnew, finally, would get some measure of comeuppance.

I assume people with bad arguments will just lose them.

Maddow on Sarah Palin accepting Fed money after all: "You can see cake from her house, and you can eat it from there too."

It is a rare man or woman who is ever really changed by ascension to high office, or tempered by the solemnity of the oaths they have sworn or by the national duties they have shouldered. And Spiro Agnew was certainly not among that rare breed.

I'm so rarely the arbiter of what all women want. I'm usually quite the outlier on that chart.

RACHEL MADDOW: That‘s why we don‘t have to worry about the antichrist until after the rapture?

Hitler was counting above all on racism and religious bigotry to carry the day in the United States, and to set the stage for global domination.