Top 90 Chris Hayes Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Chris Hayes

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

— Chris Hayes

3. “Islam does not preach hatred and violence and destruction.”

— Chris Hayes

4. “Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror. I’ve.”

— Chris Hayes

5. “Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.”

— Chris Hayes

6. “What we do know is that the era of climate change is upon us and the extraordinary in California today will become the ordinary of tomorrow.”

— Chris Hayes

7. “White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end.”

— Chris Hayes

8. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

9. “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.’”

— Chris Hayes

10. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

11. “Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn’t mean they are right, that doesn’t mean there is isn’t a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.”

— Chris Hayes

12. “Once you start thinking about growth of economy, it’s hard to think about anything else.”

— Chris Hayes

13. “David Roberts, who is a writer at Vox who I like, had a line about the voter – your voters weren’t locked in the room with you, Republican establishment. You were locked in the room with them.”

— Chris Hayes

14. “White nationalist, white supremacis feel like this is a watershed moment in the history of white supremacy in which something that had been cordoned off to the kind of white supremacist back waters, an idea like banning all Muslims from coming to the country is going to be .”

— Chris Hayes

15. “As a theory, “broken windows” played a perfect explanatory role for politicians and policy makers. If disorder leads to crime, well then, we need to crack down on disorder.”

— Chris Hayes

16. “The Republican Party is officially a dumpster fire.”

— Chris Hayes

17. “We have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn’t actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than within. A place where the mechanisms of representation don’t work enough to give citizens a sense of ownership over their own government. A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity.”

— Chris Hayes

18. “California became the last state in the west to regulate groundwater usage. The state’s first-ever mandatory water restrictions soon followed.”

— Chris Hayes

19. “Sarah Palin, suggesting her son’s arrest on domestic violence charges was a result of post-traumatic stress disorder and partially due to President Obama’s lack of respect for men and women in uniform.”

— Chris Hayes

20. “One young man asked me a simple question that gets to the core of what we’re talking about. He said, do you think the police would ever treat you the way they treat me? And the answer is, no. And that is wrong. And that has to change in this city.”

— Chris Hayes

21. “Presented with a challenge to its power, an illegitimate regime will often overreact, driven by the knowledge that all they have is force.”

— Chris Hayes

22. “Yet in the modern vocabulary of policing theory, “broken windows” has become shorthand for the polar opposite: aggressive, community-antagonistic, clean-’em-up vigilantism. The problem with “community policing,” then and now, is that so often the cops being called to enforce community norms are not part of the community. And.”

— Chris Hayes

23. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

24. “The idea of a celebrity endorsing a presidential candidate is nothing new, but the full-throated endorsement for Senator Bernie Sanders from one of the country’s biggest hip hop stars had surprised some political observers.”

— Chris Hayes

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

— Chris Hayes

26. “In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands. In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty. Police officers tasked with keeping these two realms separate intuitively grasp of the contours of this divide: as one Baltimore police sergeant instructed his officers, “Do not treat criminals like citizens.”

— Chris Hayes

27. “To be outnumbered and afraid in a land not your own, and to attempt to bring it under your control – this is the great recurring theme of the American project, and it is shot through at every moment by fear and violence and subjugation.”

— Chris Hayes

28. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

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

— Chris Hayes

30. “The criminal justice system is not a ‘system’ at all,” Pfaff writes, “and treating it as such can lead analysts to overlook important causes of prison growth.”

— Chris Hayes

31. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

32. “Fanon would say that “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

— Chris Hayes

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

— Chris Hayes

34. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

35. “Why Hollywood has killed so many movie stars with cigarette smoking, with the romanticization of it from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart, all those people had cancer, died of it, and sold cigarettes their whole career.”

— Chris Hayes

36. “The person that always wins, that’s the other thing. The monkey picking stocks always wins.”

— Chris Hayes

37. “I think I was a militant smoker, and I felt hemmed in by a wall of political correctness and I think I purposely and militantly put the smoking scenes in the movies.”

— Chris Hayes

38. “I’m a big fan of Donald Trump’s.”

— Chris Hayes

39. “No one’s dropped a cent – there’s no negative ads up against Donald Trump in Iowa which is crazy to think about.”

— Chris Hayes

40. “If someone were to say, we should not letting Jews into the country, and people had a reaction against that, would that be the same thing as that kind of toxic political correctness tamping down honest discussion?”

— Chris Hayes

41. “The liberal theory of the causes of crime – that it was born of racism, segregation, oppression, poverty, and disinvestment – painted a picture of the problem that required a set of solutions far above what the local beat cops could provide.”

— Chris Hayes

42. “That has to come to an end and end now. No citizen is a second-class citizen in the city of Chicago. If my children are treated one way, every child is treated the same way.”

— Chris Hayes

43. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

44. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

45. “I also love lifestyles of the rich and famous and guess what? It’s not unusual for me to sit in bed with my laptop and glass of wine, clicking through real estate slide shows on the New York Times website; looking at ungodly expensive homes I could not ever possibly afford.”

— Chris Hayes

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

— Chris Hayes

47. “In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands. In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty.”

— Chris Hayes

48. “But city after city has experienced versions of the same thing: drops in crime, spikes in real estate prices, and a process of gentrification that has pushed up rents for poor and working-class people, creating a nationwide affordability crisis. In 1984 poor Americans spent 35 percent of their income on rent. By 2014 that was 41 percent, with fully half of renters below the poverty line spending most of their total income to keep a roof over their head.”

— Chris Hayes

49. “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.”

— Chris Hayes

50. “To desecrate the dead is to humiliate the living, and humiliation may be the most powerful and most underappreciated force in human affairs. The angry citizen can shout, and the terrified citizen can lock the doors, or flee, or move, or arm himself. But the humiliated citizen can neither express her feelings nor respond to the offense. For it is in the nature of humiliation that it happens at the hands of someone with greater power:.”

— Chris Hayes