Top 175 Quotes & Sayings by Chris Hayes

I got my start in lefty journalism as a labor reporter at 'In These Times', and it's in my blood.

I grew up in the Bronx.

My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background.

I give so much credit to the 'Up' team who created appointment viewing on the weekends for us and some of the smartest conversations on television.

Reading off a Teleprompter is an easy skill to do passably well and a difficult skill to do very well. I still have room for improvement there. I still talk too fast and I'm trying to slow myself down.

My dream when I was 14 was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in 'The New York Review of Books.'

Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something.

My disposition as a human being is kind of a go-along-to-get-along person. I tend to trust authority.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: 'Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.'

You start noticing that people are noticing how you look, and it is a profoundly alienating experience when it first happens, where you go on TV and you say something about some topic of the day, and on the Internet people are like, 'What was up with that shirt?' 'What was up with your hair?' And you think, 'Oh, that's kind of a bummer.'

I have always viewed thinking about arguing, about questioning, pushing back with, joking, about sharing and discovering the world and the news as enjoyable, the same way that I view watching basketball.

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

I grew up in a household where we talked politics a lot and argued politics a lot.

I think people should be angry at things that are worthy of anger. Injustice is outrageous and deserves outrage.

It is genuinely shocking to me that I'm on a television show.

The political disfunction that has brought about the shutdown and now threatens default, isn't so much gridlock. It is exposing the fatal flaw in our Constitution and highly distinct system of government. In other words, it's the Constitution's fault. Something truly catastrophic was bound to happen sooner or later.

Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.

I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

[Ted] Cruz may have been hoping his reversal would fly under the radar.

The NYPD with the unconditional support of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stopped-and-frisked more black men than there are black men in New York City. Institutionalized racial discrimination in the United States is alive and well.

Donald Trump is not going anywhere. And we see as calculated as these are, he has a knack for telling a certain segment of a base what they want.

While Newt Gingrich was running for president four years ago a controversy bubbled up regarding his campaign finances. You see, in December of 2011 a watchdog group filed an FEC complaint alleging the campaign paid Gingrich himself $42,000 for his mailing list. Now, the group claimed that payment was not disclosed on his FEC filing.

After starting a blood feud with Fox News, something no Republican presidential candidate has dared to do before, [Donald] Trump seems to have successfully undermine the network in the eyes of its core audience with perception of the Fox News brand among Republican adults hitting its lowest point in three years according to a new YouGov survey.

What the issue here is, you get rid of all the conservative orthodoxy about capital gains, marginal tax rate, supply side economics, you just throw all that out the window, limited government and you just embrace the sheer and raw politics of resentment that have been bubbling the whole time and that`s what you get. You get Donald Trump.

Now, in an analysis of campaign finance filings by Politico we learned the [Donald] Trump campaign has paid Trump businesses more than $8 million so far in this race, that includes $1.3 million in rent for campaign offices, half a million for food and facilities for events, over $300,000 for corporate staffers, and nearly $6 million for the use of Trump`s private plane.

Climate change is the biggest governing challenge we face. It's the biggest governing challenge I think we've ever faced.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz did their best Donald Trump impersonation. All three unleashing an unprecedented string of insults and attacks fit more for a barroom than a presidential debate stage.

Obviously it's easier to grow faster when you are a less developed country than when you are where the U.S. is.

Chris Christie travelled to Ft. Worth, Texas, to give his blessing to a former rival who one week ago was approvingly discussing killing Muslim terrorists with bullets smeared in pig`s blood.

I`ve seen all this tussling about what is [Donald] Trump ideologically and Jim Carney said he`s a liberal and people saying, look, he`s winning moderates. Chris Christie is an example of this.

The backlash to [Sarah] Palin`s comments was swift, with veterans and veterans` groups criticizing the apparent politicization of post-traumatic stress disorder.

What you cannot conquer, circumvent but do not compromise yourself for the sake of the urban jungle, because concrete does not sympathise.

The issue of the American justice system is so much broader than any one party, or any area of the country, or any one policy, because the totality of it is that it's driven by the underlying politics. The underlying politics are white fear and wrath and punishment. And that's what tends to be consistent. As I say in the book, that's the magnet that's drawing the iron filings into alignment. That's the thing that's powering all of it. The gravitational pole of those politics operate on each of these disparate little actors.

Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about smoking and not talking about cancer.

Impossible is a word for other people to use when life scares them.

We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.

While campaigns typically purchase mailing lists, it was strange to use donor money to buy a mailing list from the campaign`s own candidate, especially when [Newt] Gingrich could have gifted the mailing list for free as an in-kind donation.

I can cite a chapter and verse of literature at the times saying Italians don`t speak our language, these folks coming from other places - it sounds identical to what you are saying about Muslims now. It really does.

We ask the education system to expiate the sins of the rest of the society and then condemn it as hopelessly broken when it doesn't prove up to the task.

According to "Huffington Post", one Democratic opposition research firm said they spent the past eight months compiling material on [Donald] Trump as he`s risen on the ranks. And that research estimated that if the all material compiled, court and property records,newspaper clips and video, approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.

The mood, it is fair to say, was reasonably tense. As a result of the conclusion of the ballot, most members are happy that this matter has now been determined.

Maybe it`s a great blow for feminism that we now have men mocking one another about their makeup. I mean, let`s - can we enjoy that? That`s kind of great.

One of the main points of the philosophy behind parkour is being able to help people... To teach them they way themselves, to gain confidence in themselves, building up from simple moves to more complex things, to teach them that they are worthwhile people.

Donald Trump isn`t doing anyone any favors by running to be the most powerful person on the planet, right?

Newt Gingrich got in hot water during his 2012 presidential race for using campaign funds to pay himself $47,000 for a mailing list.

[Marco] Rubio, in particular, focused on something far more elemental. Trump`s character and record as a businessman, and in the process perhaps added a few chapters to the Democrat`s play book against [Donald] Trump.

We got the clearest picture of Donald Trump`s weaknesses and liabilities in a general election. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally gave up on trying to convince Republican primary voters that Trump is not a real conservative, attacks that have failed to resonate.

For years, right wing outlets like outlets like Fox News and talk radio have been telling their audience day after day that any information coming from outside of conservative media is not to be trusted.

We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities. The consequences of this simple, devastating realization define American life.

In a radio interview [Ted] Cruz compared [Donald]Trump`s behavior to schoolyard children throwing taunts at each other, vowing not to take part.

I've had a dozen people tell me, maybe more, 'What would have happened if Michael Brown had shot and killed Darren Wilson? Do you think he would be free right now? Do you think he would not have been charged by now?' People just see this manifest double-standard in front of them that's coming at the long line of a whole bunch of grievances that have built up over time because of the dynamics of Ferguson and frankly, the dynamics of race in America more broadly.

Tens of millions of dollars spent, all meant to get Jeb Bush elected president. He currently is polling on average at around 5%.

With all the talk of socialism among Democrats on the campaign trail lately, there are actually quite a few people on the right looking at how resources and capital are currently distributed in this country of ours and thinking, you know, there`s got to be a better way.

As one [Jeb] Bush supporter told Politico, you might as well light all of this money [for election compaign] on fire.

When you think about the current present value of the fossil fuel reserves that are on the books, the current fossil fuel companies, the last time that that much wealth was at stake was when the South fought the Civil War.

There's no real organised body, ... so through the internet people have spread their videos, spread photos, and spread word of a new urban movement.

If you want to defend torture, well then go ahead. But please spare me any sermons about the law ever again.

Donald Trump got himself very far to the left. When he was considering running for president in 2000, he was for a 13 percent wealth tax on wealthy people to retire the national debt.

It's very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words 'heroes.' I feel ... uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.