Rachel Maddow Quotes

Agnew was like Nixon's id — without the burden of much actual knowledge or curiosity or responsibility to the country at large.

This much was certain: Germany had agents at work inside the United States; armed American fascists were being actively supported by the Hitler government; members of Congress were colluding with a German propaganda agent to facilitate an industrial-scale Nazi information operation targeting the American people; critical U.S. munitions plants were blowing up in multiple states.

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.

And George H. W. Bush did it. He delivered the message to Senator Glenn Beall, who then relayed that pressure to his brother George. George Beall donated his papers to Frostburg State University in Maryland. In those records is an official “memo to file” from July 1973, acknowledging the attempted intervention. “With respect to conversations with my brother Glenn,” Beall writes, “the discussions were most superficial and very guarded. He occasionally mentioned to me the names of persons who had been to see him or who had called him with respect to the Baltimore County investigation. Names of persons that I remember him telling me about included Vice President Agnew, [the engineer] Allen Greene [sic] and George Bush….The only specific information that he passed along to me that I can recall related to a complaint that he had heard from Bush to the effect that attorneys in this office were said to be harassing persons who had been questioned by us in the Baltimore County investigation.

I can't be frustrated at you because you’re stupid but I can be mad at you because you’re evil.

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.

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.

Beware the power of the pajama-clad, Cheeto-eating, twitter, blogging hordes. We are legion!

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.

We're no longer officially a superpower. Please turn in your badges.

Putin and his siloviki] operate in accordance with the simple principles of Joseph Goebbels: Play on the emotions; the bigger the lie, the better; lies should be repeated many times….Unfortunately, it works.

I wish to say — and I say it without the slightest hesitation — that if I had my way about it at this hour, I would build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of the earth could possibly scale or ascend it.” —

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 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.

That Huey built roads and bridges and provided free schoolbooks nobody will deny, but nobody knows how much they cost or how much money was stolen in the process,” wrote one nationally syndicated columnist. “Huey was gradually copying the Hitler state, but Louisiana was not quite ready for blood purges and internment camps.