Top 152 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Noah - Page 3

You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.

When a conservative praises a liberal as 'morally serious,' he means that person is less liberal than most.

I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

What people want is big government that they don't have to pay for.

Sometime, while I wasn't paying attention, trickle-down economics got respectable.

The typical family of four with employer-based health insurance is not the same as the typical family of four. It's better-off.

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

Republicans don't seem to mind taking inflation into account when the subject is tax rates.

Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure.

Stock prices relative to company assets are no better at signaling the likelihood of future earnings growth than they were the day the Titanic sank, and risk management is a good deal worse.

Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford's.

Right now, as I'm typing this, some liberal somewhere is saying something unforgivable about Michelle Bachmann or Ann Coulter. I condemn you, whoever you are! But I'm not going to conduct a house-to-house search to find you.

I recognize that Republicans see a moral difference between a dollar taken away from a millionaire in government benefits and a dollar taken away from a millionaire in taxes.

Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all.

The thing to strive for is to get paid to talk about yourself.

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

Was President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage crassly political? God, I hope so.

What the 1990s taught the Clinton veterans was that you could 'triangulate' with a GOP-controlled Congress.

The worst an ex-con is likely to do if given the right to vote is vote for a Democrat.

Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from owning a gun. Seems like kind of a good idea, no?

Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.

GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.

We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.

One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.

Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.

If the Pentagon truly confined itself to providing defense, then presumably we wouldn't need a whole separate government agency to provide 'Homeland Security.'

The Reagan years really were a bonanza for the rich; you didn't imagine that.

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'

The fallacy is that politicians don't really do much about social issues. They just demonize their opponents as elitists and reap the benefit. It's a stupid way to do politics. Economic issues can more often be addressed concretely, and it would seem logical for people to vote their interests in this area.

There is quite a lot of mutual misunderstanding between the upper middle class and the working class. Reviewing what's been said about the white working class and the Democrats, I realized that there's even a lot of disagreement about who the working class IS.