Top 152 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Noah - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Timothy Noah.
Last updated on November 24, 2024.
Whenever a Kurd wants to measure the depth of some foreign leader's commitment to Kurdish autonomy, he listens for one particular word. That word is 'federal.' Anyone who will say he favors Kurdish federalism can be counted a friend of the Kurds.
Rule of thumb: When Democrats lose, they blame the candidate. When Republicans lose, they blame the opposition.
Expressing truth is hard work.
The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.
With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.
There's no shortage of Democrats who are at least as committed as Schwarzenegger to reducing greenhouse gases.
One of the enduring mysteries of America's occupation of Iraq is why a nation that so little relishes peacekeeping nonetheless refuses to turn the job over to the United Nations.
The United States is not, nor has ever been, anything close to a fascist country.
Under Obama, income growth has been confined almost entirely to those at the top of the income distribution, continuing a pattern that began under President George W. Bush.
Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.
What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university.
To argue that universal health care would wreck the U.S. lead in cancer survival, you'd have to argue that universal health care would wreck the entire U.S. economy.
One can imagine nonviolent or minimally violent ways to reduce or eliminate hatred, but there's no mollifying evil.
Romney has become reluctant to say that human activity causes global warming, and even in his greener days he was always somewhat cagey about which remedies he'd support.
President Obama seems to think that you win by demonstrating that you're a more reasonable person than your opponents. It didn't work too badly, I'll grant, as an electoral strategy in the 2012 election.
It never fails to astonish me how cheaply a politician can be bought.
Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word.
There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.
Creativity seldom thrives in an atmosphere of great discipline or scrutiny. That's one reason we tend not to want our leaders to get too creative.
The advantage of a market-based national defense is obvious: Every citizen would receive an individualized amount of military protection, based on the value each of us placed on defending the homeland.
If the 1992 and 2000 elections were any guide, third-party candidates are death on the mainstream parties with which they're most naturally aligned.
Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work.
What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.
The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet.
The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.
The Supreme Court needs jurists, not politicians.
Washington culture has always had a difficult time acknowledging untruth.
The Bush administration got a lot of things horribly wrong in its disaster response to the New Orleans flood, and it deserves almost all of the bitter recriminations hurled its way.
What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.
Deciding which ideas to save and which ideas to discard is one of society's most important tasks.
Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.
Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.
You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn't have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas.
There's a growing consensus that the best way to defeat communism in Cuba is to get its citizens hooked on American goods.
The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.
No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.
Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes.
Universities are basically socialist institutions.
The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.
The gulf between Virginia and Maryland isn't only a function of geography. It's also sociological. Indeed, it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that Maryland suburbanites and Virginia suburbanites constitute two mutually hostile tribes.
If Romney were a chair, he'd be a squishy, expensively upholstered easy chair that bore the imprint of whoever last sat on it.
We all need to save money to send our kids to college, to buy our first house, and to retire. But the truth is that most of us don't save very much.
I've come to the conclusion that the government needs to impose price controls on tuition increases - and so, I think, has President Obama.
The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.
On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.
Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.
Without the three-fifths rule, there wouldn't have been a Constitution of the United States - not one that governed the American South, at any rate - because the South wouldn't have ratified it.
Politicians have such large egos that it usually takes them an inordinately long time to grasp when they've become a pathetic joke.
The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'
Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington - the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city's avatars of centrism and continuity - Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.
We Americans love our Constitution so much that we can't bear to change even the stupid parts.
If one does not wish to take the word of journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations that Iraq conducted a deliberate campaign to eradicate the Kurdish population, there's always the word of the Iraqis themselves.
In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.
The Sudan bombing is a blot on the Clinton presidency, and a blot it ought to remain.
When the topic is growing income inequality, it's hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead, conservatives try to argue that it doesn't exist.
Electing Barack Obama president was a glorious Jackie Robinson moment for the United States of America. Obama didn't just win; he became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a popular-vote majority.
Capitalism can't deliver decent health care.
A thriving middle class is a necessary precondition for a free representative government.
We live in a diverse nation, but it isn't that diverse. If any one state showed results so dramatically different from the results in each of the other 50 states, the likeliest explanation would be that someone had tampered with the polls.
Obama is an intelligent man whose life and work experience sensitize him to class distinctions.
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