Top 70 Thomas Frank Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad.”

— Thomas Frank

2. “When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling.”

— Thomas Frank

3. “Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish.”

— Thomas Frank

4. “When you take somebody’s quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody’s ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong.”

— Thomas Frank

5. “I was in a bad mood when I wrote that.”

— Thomas Frank

6. “There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source.”

— Thomas Frank

7. “I think there’s great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.”

— Thomas Frank

8. “When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people – when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people – issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.”

— Thomas Frank

9. “In the subprime mortgage industry, bankers handed out iffy loans like candy at a parade because such loans meant revenue and, hence, bonuses for executives in the here-and-now.”

— Thomas Frank

10. “The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.”

— Thomas Frank

11. “Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.”

— Thomas Frank

12. “Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful – isn’t even a city, really – unless it can lay claim to being ‘vibrant.’”

— Thomas Frank

13. “As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.”

— Thomas Frank

14. “You should definitely take notes when you read -.”

— Thomas Frank

15. “This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.”

— Thomas Frank

16. “For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.”

— Thomas Frank

17. “Then there are disturbing reports like the recent study showing that, in terms of wealth, black and Hispanic college graduates actually “fared significantly worse” in the late recession than did members of those groups who hadn’t gone to college. The people in question were the ones who did everything right, who went through life the way our society instructs us to, and they were punished for it.28 And.”

— Thomas Frank

18. “Massive inequality, we have learned, isn’t the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it’s also profoundly ugly.”

— Thomas Frank

19. “Conservatism is not a doctrine of contentment. Not a doctrine for the satisfied and the smug. It’s a politics that’s at war with the world.”

— Thomas Frank

20. “Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.”

— Thomas Frank

21. “The Obama administration’s plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a ‘systemic risk’ if they were to fail.”

— Thomas Frank

22. “In truth, however, nothing is inevitable and very little is new. And tech is no more the root of the problem than are trade or globalization. Many of our most vaunted innovations are simply methods – electronic or otherwise – of pulling off some age-old profit-maximizing maneuver by new and unregulated means.”

— Thomas Frank

23. “What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn’t deny it and doesn’t try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.”

— Thomas Frank

24. “Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.”

— Thomas Frank

25. “I have a habit of reading a book for at least 15 minutes a day, and whenever I finish a chapter, I immediately go over to Evernote and type out some notes on what I read. When I do this the Outline Method is my system of choice. While.”

— Thomas Frank

26. “Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.”

— Thomas Frank

27. “During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires.”

— Thomas Frank

28. “Joe Klein is the flower of American political journalism, a sharp raconteur who shows traces of the gonzo style that was in vogue when he was honing his craft at Rolling Stone back in the day.”

— Thomas Frank

29. “Making Group Projects Suck Less I.”

— Thomas Frank

30. “Media bias has been a favorite theme of the Right for decades, of course.”

— Thomas Frank

31. “I was never a fan of Barack Obama’s bipartisanship routine.”

— Thomas Frank

32. “Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.”

— Thomas Frank

33. “The thing now is to seem concerned in a vaguely social-democratic way.”

— Thomas Frank

34. “To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.”

— Thomas Frank

35. “Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.”

— Thomas Frank

36. “Thanks to a deal finalized in 2008, Chicago’s parking meters will be operated for the next 75 years by a group of investors put together by Morgan Stanley, including the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi.”

— Thomas Frank

37. “We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton’s, or Abraham Lincoln’s?”

— Thomas Frank

38. “In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It’s not as if people don’t know what is going on.”

— Thomas Frank

39. “Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.”

— Thomas Frank

40. “Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system’s first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.”

— Thomas Frank

41. “When done right – or wrong, depending on how you look at it – deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there’s no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties.”

— Thomas Frank

42. “Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and ‘zombie’ financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead.”

— Thomas Frank

43. “The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation’s city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration’s economic recovery strategy for the nation.”

— Thomas Frank

44. “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.”

— Thomas Frank

45. “This is modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representatives of one class of humanity ritually forgive the sins of another class, all of it convened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertise propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunate objects of their high and noble compassion sink slowly back into a preindustrial state.”

— Thomas Frank

46. “Under the administration of George W. Bush, you will recall, federal spending grew pretty significantly. At the same time, the number of people directly employed by the federal government shrank. One of the factors that explained the difference was contracting.”

— Thomas Frank

47. “A lot of populists after populism died just became socialists. At the beginning of the 20th century, socialism looked like it was going to take off. It didn’t, of course, but a lot of people thought it was going to.”

— Thomas Frank

48. “Financial regulation is the next item on the political horizon, and it doesn’t have to be the deathly dull wonk-battle that it sounds like. In fact, if the Democrats do their job, it can just as easily become a platform for addressing the greatest issues of them all.”

— Thomas Frank

49. “While Democrats fussed with the details of health care reforms, conservatives spent months telling the nation that the real issue is freedom, that what’s on the line is American liberty itself.”

— Thomas Frank

50. “Your mind does all the work involved in earning awesome grades, and the performance of that mind is dependent on the state of your body.”

— Thomas Frank