Top 120 Matt Taibbi Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

52. “For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

56. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

58. “Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight.”

— Matt Taibbi

59. “Having lived in a collapsed empire before – I lived in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed – you can see a lot of the classic signs of an empire that’s on its way out.”

— Matt Taibbi

60. “It may be that America has become too big and complicated for most people to deal with being part of. People are longing for a smaller, stupider reality.”

— Matt Taibbi

61. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

62. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

63. “Donald Trump, a man whose idea of policy is a big wall, was the Republican front-runner for months, and ceded the lead to a man who wants to fight immigrants with drones. This whole thing is a joke.”

— Matt Taibbi

64. “Sixty million people were announcing that they preferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts. Blue-state.”

— Matt Taibbi

65. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

66. “Irony alert: the most important news story in the world is the inability of the ordinary news consumer to understand the news. This is no dig against readers. The world has just grown so complex that the majority of serious issues are beyond the understanding of non-specialists.”

— Matt Taibbi

67. “One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.”

— Matt Taibbi

68. “In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you’ve been around for years.”

— Matt Taibbi

69. “Anyone who takes a close-enough look at how we run elections in this country will conclude that the process is designed to be regressive. It distracts us with trivialities and drives us apart during two years of furious arguments. It’s a divide-and-conquer mechanism that keeps us from communicating with one another, and prevents us from examining the broader, systematic problems we all face together.”

— Matt Taibbi

70. “How Giuliani is not Trump’s running mate no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate love story since Beavis and Butthead.”

— Matt Taibbi

71. “It may not seem funny now, because it’s happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.”

— Matt Taibbi

72. “I get the cynicism thing all the time, although I don’t really know where that comes from, because I think I’m actually the opposite of a cynic.”

— Matt Taibbi

73. “Why is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate.”

— Matt Taibbi

74. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

75. “America’s always had a real passion for lunatic movements.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

77. “For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don’t, it’s a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what’s at the end of it.”

— Matt Taibbi

78. “Win or lose, Trump’s campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid S.”

— Matt Taibbi

79. “Being in the building with Sarah Palin that night is a transformative and oddly unsettling experience. It’s a little like having live cave-level access for the ripping-the-heart-out-with-the-bare-hands scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

— Matt Taibbi

80. “For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.”

— Matt Taibbi

81. “The only reason investors haven’t run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.”

— Matt Taibbi

82. “Democracy doesn’t require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.”

— Matt Taibbi

83. “America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on.”

— Matt Taibbi

84. “What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides.”

— Matt Taibbi

85. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

86. “I’m a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.”

— Matt Taibbi

87. “TV is the ultimate leveling phenomenon. It makes everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality. That.”

— Matt Taibbi

88. “I think that if you’re a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new.”

— Matt Taibbi

89. “More and more often, we all make silent calculations about who is entitled to what rights, and who is not.”

— Matt Taibbi

90. “If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat.”

— Matt Taibbi

91. “Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money?”

— Matt Taibbi

92. “Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we’re building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.”

— Matt Taibbi

93. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

94. “The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending – with the exception of the money spent on them.”

— Matt Taibbi

95. “We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.”

— Matt Taibbi

96. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi

97. “Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism.”

— Matt Taibbi

98. “America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show. And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.”

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

100. “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.”

— Matt Taibbi