Matt Taibbi Quotes

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.

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

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

I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.

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

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

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.

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

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

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

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.

There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality

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.

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.

In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.

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

One loves one's country the way one loves a family member. And sometimes that family member does really embarrassing, shitty things. But you still love them.

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.

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.

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.

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

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

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.

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

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

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

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

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.

America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements.

The Congressional Record will forever show that [Obamacare] was passed in a romper room of overgrown children seemingly barely old enough to keep from peeing on themselves.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

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

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.

I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new.

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.

America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.

Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

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