Top 136 Quotes & Sayings by Matt Taibbi

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.

What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over and over again those campaign contributions through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove.

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

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

It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.

In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires.

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

I don't often get angered by the things press spokespeople say. Most of these people have difficult jobs and are often forced to be the public faces of policies they had nothing to do with creating.

I actually never thought that Barack Obama was anything but a typical Democratic party politician, which to me meant that he was probably in bed with Wall Street.

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance.

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.

You know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes people think twice about committing crimes the next time? The kind that actually comes out of some individual's pocket, not fines that come out of the corporate kitty.

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.

You know, I used to live in Russia where you had officers in the military opening up the warehouses at night and taking weapons out and putting them into a truck and selling them to foreign powers. That type of stuff doesn't happen in the United States. We still have a very functioning and relatively civil society.

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

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

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

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

It's really interesting that we've had this great Tea Party movement that is all about restoring free market capitalist values, but what they completely fail to understand is that what we've got now is a situation where there is a small class of gigantic financial companies that have put themselves above capitalism.

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game.

The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis - and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway - shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence.

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

I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they're normal and can't be changed. A lot of what I write about is, 'Hey, you know, this stuff is really awful, and it doesn't need to be, and that's why it's so offensive.' Things should be better.

In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

Obviously, people who commit crimes should be punished. Even people who steal socks and 'Snow White' videos should probably do time if they have priors, especially serious priors. But the punishment has to fit the crime, and the standard has to be the same for everyone.

Candidates don't want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others out completely.

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

In the old days, when you took out a mortgage, it was probably through a local bank or a credit union, and whoever gave you your loan held on to it for life. If you lost your job or got too sick to work and suddenly had trouble making your payments, you could call a human being and work things out.

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

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.

It's increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

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

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.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.

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

Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill.

The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.

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

You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again.

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom.

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will 'take our country back' from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.

When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins.

Comparing your family budget to the sovereign debt of the United States is a little like comparing two kindergartners tossing a paper airplane to the Apollo 11 mission.

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.

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

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

Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

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

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

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

The threat posed by Bank of America isn't just financial - it's a full-blown assault on the American dream. Where's the incentive to play fair and do well, when what we see rewarded at the highest levels of society is failure, stupidity, incompetence and meanness? If this is what winning in our system looks like, who doesn't want to be a loser?

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.

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

I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.