Top 120 Matt Taibbi Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.”

— Matt Taibbi

2. “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

— Matt Taibbi

3. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

4. “Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

6. “At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

8. “If the law doesn’t apply equally to everybody, then you don’t really have a system of law.”

— Matt Taibbi

9. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

10. “In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.”

— Matt Taibbi

11. “Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

13. “The joy of being a consumer is that it doesnt require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.”

— Matt Taibbi

14. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

15. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

16. “When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good.”

— Matt Taibbi

17. “Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process.”

— Matt Taibbi

18. “The significance of Columbus’s discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth.”

— Matt Taibbi

19. “As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.”

— Matt Taibbi

20. “Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.”

— Matt Taibbi

21. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

22. “This idea that you can’t be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don’t stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It’s possible to do this job with honor and dignity.”

— Matt Taibbi

23. “Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way.”

— Matt Taibbi

24. “Too-big-to-fail, meet small-enough-to-jail.”

— Matt Taibbi

25. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

27. “The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

29. “Our leaders know we’re turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what’s happened.”

— Matt Taibbi

30. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

31. “Ironically, the very brokest people in America, Hispanic immigrants, are one of America’s last great cash crops.”

— Matt Taibbi

32. “Accelerated by social media, moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting.”

— Matt Taibbi

33. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

35. “George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.”

— Matt Taibbi

36. “Meanwhile the pessimism of Trump’s revolution is intentional, impassioned, ascendant. They placed a huge bet on America’s worst instincts, and won. And the first order of business will be to wipe out a national idea in which they never believed. Welcome to the end of the dream.”

— Matt Taibbi

37. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

38. “The notion of “long-term greedy” vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.”

— Matt Taibbi

39. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

40. “Donald Trump, if elected, would find a way to turn being the president into a moneymaking operation. Sanders.”

— Matt Taibbi

41. “You can tell a lot about a country by how boring its media is. If you turn on the TV and immediately feel like going to sleep, it generally means the political class feels secure.”

— Matt Taibbi

42. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

43. “By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.”

— Matt Taibbi

44. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

45. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

46. “An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.”

— Matt Taibbi

47. “John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich.”

— Matt Taibbi

48. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

49. “Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi