Top 120 Rachel Maddow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I would like to be a polyglot.”

— Rachel Maddow

2. “If you’re someone people count on, particularly in difficult moments, that’s a sign of a life lived honorably.”

— Rachel Maddow

3. “I know every film is different. Every filmmaker is different and works differently.”

— Rachel Maddow

4. “Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.”

— Rachel Maddow

5. “My life is better with every year of living it.”

— Rachel Maddow

6. “I’m undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”

— Rachel Maddow

7. “Military preparedness is absolutely a form of strength.”

— Rachel Maddow

8. “The single best thing about honesty is that it requires no follow-up.”

— Rachel Maddow

9. “The idea of the Overton Window of using people on the political fringe to change the terms of acceptable debate, that’s an idea that’s been hugely influential in conservative politics since Joseph P. Overton thought it up, making radical ideas seem acceptable by advocating for the unthinkable.”

— Rachel Maddow

10. “I’m a sarcastic person. I learn through humor.”

— Rachel Maddow

11. “Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong.”

— Rachel Maddow

12. “If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you’d be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here.”

— Rachel Maddow

13. “The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you’ve just told them.”

— Rachel Maddow

14. “Marine Le Pen is more careful than her dad was about saying things like denying the Holocaust, right? But it’s the same politics. It’s the same modern anti anti-immigrant, anti-and the Semitic, xenophobic authoritarian modern pseudo-fascism.”

— Rachel Maddow

15. “I am too old to know how to put a naked photograph of myself on the Internet.”

— Rachel Maddow

16. “Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, “Detail in History.” But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics.”

— Rachel Maddow

17. “The downside of playing dumb is that you sound dumb.”

— Rachel Maddow

18. “We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies.”

— Rachel Maddow

19. “We are willing to follow leaders only to the extent we believe they call on our best, not our worst.”

— Rachel Maddow

20. “People who disagree on important issues don’t agree on the facts.”

— Rachel Maddow

21. “You know just because you don’t like the way it sounds when I say it or you don’t like my haircut or you don’t like that I’m gay, it does not mean that what we say is not true. If you squint a little bit, it is true I do sometimes look like a dude, and I am definitely gay.”

— Rachel Maddow

22. “If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later.”

— Rachel Maddow

23. “I really believe in trying to increase the amount of useful information in the world and in being accurate in the sense that you can take what I say to the bank, even if you disagree with me.”

— Rachel Maddow

24. “If you have to hire paid actors to impersonate people who politically support you, people don’t actually natively politically support you. You are not a political animal that exists in nature.”

— Rachel Maddow

25. “Social security isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s not bankrupting us. It’s not an outrage. It is working.”

— Rachel Maddow

26. “I loved being on the radio. Being paid to talk? It’s like being paid to eat.”

— Rachel Maddow

27. “I’m a national security liberal, which I tell people because it’s meant to sound absurd.”

— Rachel Maddow

28. “Hopefully life is long. Do stuff you will enjoy thinking about and telling stories about for many years to come. Do stuff you will want to brag about.”

— Rachel Maddow

29. “Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don’t fall in line with people who don’t respect us and who we don’t believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst.”

— Rachel Maddow

30. “Sarah Palin is now the guy who hangs out in the high school parking lot, showing off his car, five years after he graduated.”

— Rachel Maddow

31. “Britains still commemorate the Battle of Cable Street in London. There are still pop songs in Britain that reference Sir Oswald Mosley and his black shirts.”

— Rachel Maddow

32. “Fascism is not just a word. It’s not just a way to insult someone with whom you disagree. It is a specific thing. It is a specific form of far right politics that involves a sort of narcissistic cult of superman action around the leader of the party.”

— Rachel Maddow

33. “As proud and capable as it is, I think the idea that the military can build new countries is a tall order, and it’s the sort of thing that we would only expect from a military that we have superresourced and thought of as supercapable.”

— Rachel Maddow

34. “A handkerchief can never be put in another pocket after it has been in one pocket. I don’t walk under ladders. I have items of clothing that are lucky for me. That rotates, but I am luck-oriented.”

— Rachel Maddow

35. “I care a lot about what my girlfriend thinks, and my friends, but ultimately it’s me in the mirror. I just want to be proud of what I do.”

— Rachel Maddow

36. “In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a ‘Public Safety Complex’ around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station.”

— Rachel Maddow

37. “You may never have heard of Joseph Overton and his proverbial window but you most certainly have heard the Republican presidential campaign in 2015 year not just flinging the window open but shattering all its glass.”

— Rachel Maddow

38. “I don’t feel passionately about politics, i’m not a political person. Is it easy for me to get fired up about someone’s position on climate change? No, it’s not. On most of these issues, I can see both sides.”

— Rachel Maddow

39. “I’m in favor of outing when people have demonized or scapegoated gay people for their own public gain. I don’t think just being a Republican is reason enough.”

— Rachel Maddow

40. “Formula 1 racing had a personal scandal right up at the top of its governing body that was so weird, that was so flagrantly salacious and bizarre, that I think it not only reassured American racing fans that Formula 1, yes, really is kind of weird.”

— Rachel Maddow

41. “That was like seeing a dodo and a unicorn all wrapped up in one.”

— Rachel Maddow

42. “We all now have to decide whether we’re comfortable using this word, weather fascism is too over the top to use in this context of our politics right now in our country or whether it helps because it’s accurate, to basically describe this as America’s Sir Oswald Mosley moment.”

— Rachel Maddow

43. “Bernie Sanders are the only person who talks about the kinds of things that might be driving people to support Donald Trump in such large numbers in the Republican Party.”

— Rachel Maddow

44. “Having a place out of the city is a shortcut toward the mental reset I need.”

— Rachel Maddow

45. “Americans are incredibly religious as a nation, and we have gotten that way by having the government stay out of religion and say religion is a private matter. The government doesn’t take sides. Public schools don’t promote or denigrate any religion.”

— Rachel Maddow

46. “Gay people – generally speaking – have a responsibility to our own community and to future generations of gay people to come out, if and when we feel that we can.”

— Rachel Maddow

47. “I’m in favor of outing when people have demonized or scapegoated gay people for their own public gain. When they have risen to public prominence on the backs of the gay community that they are part of and they prey on, I think that’s absolutely deserving of outing.”

— Rachel Maddow

48. “I’m not trying to change things in the world and trying to use my leverage to do so. The only thing I’m trying to change in the world is that I’m trying to increase the amount of useful information in it. And entertainment, honestly.”

— Rachel Maddow

49. “No matter what Donald Trump does, he’s guaranteed to have support from the Republican Party.”

— Rachel Maddow

50. “In the rest of the world though, particularly in Europe, the most popular form of racing is not stock cars. It’s not NASCAR. It doesn’t look anything like NASCAR. It’s Formula 1.”

— Rachel Maddow