Timothy Noah Quotes

Universities are basically socialist institutions.

- Timothy Noah

I've come to the conclusion that the government needs to impose price controls on tuition increases - and so, I think, has President Obama.

- Timothy Noah

The advantage of a market-based national defense is obvious: Every citizen would receive an individualized amount of military protection, based on the value each of us placed on defending the homeland.

- Timothy Noah

Bottom line: A market approach to national defense would give us a lousy national defense.

- Timothy Noah

Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes.

- Timothy Noah

If Romney were a chair, he'd be a squishy, expensively upholstered easy chair that bore the imprint of whoever last sat on it.

- Timothy Noah

The intriguing aspect of food charges on airlines is that they create the perfect laboratory for any economist who wishes to study the question of how to price a good that possesses, by universal consensus, absolutely no objective value.

- Timothy Noah

The Sudan bombing is a blot on the Clinton presidency, and a blot it ought to remain.

- Timothy Noah

The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.

- Timothy Noah

The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'

- Timothy Noah

Why does Medicare have such difficulty accommodating a cut - no, wait, a trim to its annual spending increase - of two measly percentage points? Two words: baby boom.

- Timothy Noah

Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

- Timothy Noah

When a conservative praises a liberal as 'morally serious,' he means that person is less liberal than most.

- Timothy Noah

The Pentagon got fed up with its recruits getting ripped off by payday lenders and in 2007 got Congress to make it illegal to extend such loans to members of the military. But civilians remain fair game.

- Timothy Noah

Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington - the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city's avatars of centrism and continuity - Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.

- Timothy Noah

The problem with wanting the tax code to be 'simpler, fairer,' and 'pro-growth' is that it's impossible to achieve all three at the same time.

- Timothy Noah

An orthodox belief in big government's inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry's inability to compete with big government.

- Timothy Noah

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.

- Timothy Noah

The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.

- Timothy Noah

If the Pentagon truly confined itself to providing defense, then presumably we wouldn't need a whole separate government agency to provide 'Homeland Security.'

- Timothy Noah

GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.

- Timothy Noah

Washington culture has always had a difficult time acknowledging untruth.

- Timothy Noah

I'd never have guessed that, six years after Medicare introduced a drug benefit, it would still be forbidden to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. Health reform might fix that, but it probably won't.

- Timothy Noah

In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.

- Timothy Noah

The pathological degree to which former Vice President Dick Cheney operated in secrecy led to government abuses that we'll probably spend years learning about.

- Timothy Noah

Politicians have such large egos that it usually takes them an inordinately long time to grasp when they've become a pathetic joke.

- Timothy Noah

What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university.

- Timothy Noah

To cut the federal budget without cutting entitlements is like giving up chocolate-chip cookies and then deciding it's OK to eat the ones that don't have any nuts.

- Timothy Noah

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

- Timothy Noah

Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.

- Timothy Noah

The only agency of the federal government with a more demoralized workforce than Homeland Security is the Small Business Administration, a notorious turkey farm that should have been abolished years ago.

- Timothy Noah

One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.

- Timothy Noah

You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn't have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas.

- Timothy Noah

One can imagine nonviolent or minimally violent ways to reduce or eliminate hatred, but there's no mollifying evil.

- Timothy Noah

President Obama seems to think that you win by demonstrating that you're a more reasonable person than your opponents. It didn't work too badly, I'll grant, as an electoral strategy in the 2012 election.

- Timothy Noah

I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

- Timothy Noah

Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich's bidding.

- Timothy Noah

The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago.

- Timothy Noah

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.

- Timothy Noah

The gulf between Virginia and Maryland isn't only a function of geography. It's also sociological. Indeed, it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that Maryland suburbanites and Virginia suburbanites constitute two mutually hostile tribes.

- Timothy Noah

The embourgeoisement of China's proletariat may be the inevitable result of its industrialization, but 'inevitable' isn't the same as 'speedy.'

- Timothy Noah

There's no shortage of Democrats who are at least as committed as Schwarzenegger to reducing greenhouse gases.

- Timothy Noah

We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.

- Timothy Noah

It's no surprise that Mitt Romney bent himself into a pretzel to disavow the portions of Obamacare that derive from his own reform in Massachusetts.

- Timothy Noah

When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'

- Timothy Noah

Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands.

- Timothy Noah

Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure.

- Timothy Noah

Nothing energizes me more than to burrow myself under a pile of received wisdom and emerge triumphant with the truth.

- Timothy Noah

Presidential election results in 2008 and 2012 clarified that talk radio was not, in fact, running the country.

- Timothy Noah

The Bush administration got a lot of things horribly wrong in its disaster response to the New Orleans flood, and it deserves almost all of the bitter recriminations hurled its way.

- Timothy Noah

I'm an incompetent consumer. I have two settings: Buy and Don't Buy.

- Timothy Noah

Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford's.

- Timothy Noah

Deciding which ideas to save and which ideas to discard is one of society's most important tasks.

- Timothy Noah

Was President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage crassly political? God, I hope so.

- Timothy Noah

Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.

- Timothy Noah

The $100 bill may be America's most successful export.

- Timothy Noah

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

- Timothy Noah

Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn't. It's just hiding behind a call center in Manila.

- Timothy Noah

What the 1990s taught the Clinton veterans was that you could 'triangulate' with a GOP-controlled Congress.

- Timothy Noah

When businesses affirmatively like regulations, that's when to reach for your wallet.

- Timothy Noah

We live in a diverse nation, but it isn't that diverse. If any one state showed results so dramatically different from the results in each of the other 50 states, the likeliest explanation would be that someone had tampered with the polls.

- Timothy Noah

What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.

- Timothy Noah

You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.

- Timothy Noah

The GOP doesn't seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.

- Timothy Noah

In removing the friction involved in paying bills, electronic billing has substantially increased the friction involved in not paying them.

- Timothy Noah

The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.

- Timothy Noah

The U.S. policy of hoarding crude oil never made the world, or even the U.S., a safer place.

- Timothy Noah

Creativity seldom thrives in an atmosphere of great discipline or scrutiny. That's one reason we tend not to want our leaders to get too creative.

- Timothy Noah

One of the enduring mysteries of America's occupation of Iraq is why a nation that so little relishes peacekeeping nonetheless refuses to turn the job over to the United Nations.

- Timothy Noah

No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.

- Timothy Noah

I'm all for lifting the payroll-tax cap, if only to make payroll taxes a little less regressive.

- Timothy Noah

Voters care only that student loans remain freely available and that they cost taxpayers as little as possible.

- Timothy Noah

Whatever the reason, American Muslims appear far less inclined to support the global jihad than their European counterparts.

- Timothy Noah

With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.

- Timothy Noah

If the 1992 and 2000 elections were any guide, third-party candidates are death on the mainstream parties with which they're most naturally aligned.

- Timothy Noah

Everyone agrees that animals should not be exposed to unnecessary pain. But neither should scientists be hamstrung by the requirement to use anesthesia in every animal experiment that might cause pain.

- Timothy Noah

There's a growing consensus that the best way to defeat communism in Cuba is to get its citizens hooked on American goods.

- Timothy Noah

Gun Owners of America is a lobby group dedicated to the proposition that the National Rifle Association is a bunch of accommodationist sissies.

- Timothy Noah

We all need to save money to send our kids to college, to buy our first house, and to retire. But the truth is that most of us don't save very much.

- Timothy Noah

If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court wishes us to believe, they are stunningly unpatriotic ones.

- Timothy Noah

The federal government does not trample in jackboots those with whom it does business. It wraps them in cotton batting and, when they express ingratitude, apologizes profusely.

- Timothy Noah

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

- Timothy Noah

A thriving middle class is a necessary precondition for a free representative government.

- Timothy Noah

What type of 'person' is the for-profit corporation? A spoiled brat - all rights and no responsibilities, a traditional conservative argument would say.

- Timothy Noah

Stock prices relative to company assets are no better at signaling the likelihood of future earnings growth than they were the day the Titanic sank, and risk management is a good deal worse.

- Timothy Noah

Under Obama, income growth has been confined almost entirely to those at the top of the income distribution, continuing a pattern that began under President George W. Bush.

- Timothy Noah

Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I'm glad to live in a capitalist country.

- Timothy Noah

If one does not wish to take the word of journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations that Iraq conducted a deliberate campaign to eradicate the Kurdish population, there's always the word of the Iraqis themselves.

- Timothy Noah

The war to rein in Wall Street excess is never over.

- Timothy Noah

Whenever a Kurd wants to measure the depth of some foreign leader's commitment to Kurdish autonomy, he listens for one particular word. That word is 'federal.' Anyone who will say he favors Kurdish federalism can be counted a friend of the Kurds.

- Timothy Noah

The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.

- Timothy Noah

Electing Barack Obama president was a glorious Jackie Robinson moment for the United States of America. Obama didn't just win; he became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a popular-vote majority.

- Timothy Noah

Whenever a president nominates somebody to a high-profile post, there is always the risk that some skeleton, real or imagined, will emerge from the nominee's closet and doom the whole enterprise.

- Timothy Noah

Working people vote!

- Timothy Noah

Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all.

- Timothy Noah

The worst an ex-con is likely to do if given the right to vote is vote for a Democrat.

- Timothy Noah

When the topic is growing income inequality, it's hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead, conservatives try to argue that it doesn't exist.

- Timothy Noah

Spoken language's elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word.

- Timothy Noah

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.

- Timothy Noah

Right now, as I'm typing this, some liberal somewhere is saying something unforgivable about Michelle Bachmann or Ann Coulter. I condemn you, whoever you are! But I'm not going to conduct a house-to-house search to find you.

- Timothy Noah

Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don't acquire wisdom from it.

- Timothy Noah

Income inequality has gotten worse under President Barack Obama.

- Timothy Noah

Romney has become reluctant to say that human activity causes global warming, and even in his greener days he was always somewhat cagey about which remedies he'd support.

- Timothy Noah

The chief purpose of a union is to maximize the income of its members.

- Timothy Noah

Obama is an intelligent man whose life and work experience sensitize him to class distinctions.

- Timothy Noah

Without the three-fifths rule, there wouldn't have been a Constitution of the United States - not one that governed the American South, at any rate - because the South wouldn't have ratified it.

- Timothy Noah

What I've come to believe is that psychological advice isn't worth much if it isn't rooted in personal experience.

- Timothy Noah

The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.

- Timothy Noah

Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.

- Timothy Noah

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

- Timothy Noah

If we were to compile a list of the ways in which the United States has made both itself and the wider world a better place, then at or very near the top would be its commitment to universal education.

- Timothy Noah

To argue that universal health care would wreck the U.S. lead in cancer survival, you'd have to argue that universal health care would wreck the entire U.S. economy.

- Timothy Noah

The financial services industry is a ward of the state.

- Timothy Noah

I recognize that Republicans see a moral difference between a dollar taken away from a millionaire in government benefits and a dollar taken away from a millionaire in taxes.

- Timothy Noah

Republicans don't seem to mind taking inflation into account when the subject is tax rates.

- Timothy Noah

For any politician who didn't enter office a wealthy man, nothing says 'I take bribes' like a Rolex watch.

- Timothy Noah

President Obama has his faults, but overall, I think, is a good president.

- Timothy Noah

Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from owning a gun. Seems like kind of a good idea, no?

- Timothy Noah

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

- Timothy Noah

Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work.

- Timothy Noah

Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.

- Timothy Noah

With its Medicaid expansion, Obamacare may turn out to be the most equality-promoting policy enacted in a generation.

- Timothy Noah

Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.

- Timothy Noah

The United States is not, nor has ever been, anything close to a fascist country.

- Timothy Noah

Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

- Timothy Noah

We Americans love our Constitution so much that we can't bear to change even the stupid parts.

- Timothy Noah

The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet.

- Timothy Noah

The typical family of four with employer-based health insurance is not the same as the typical family of four. It's better-off.

- Timothy Noah

On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.

- Timothy Noah

You have to let the market reward effort and skill. But a system in which inequality of incomes constantly increases over time is worrisome.

- Timothy Noah

Rule of thumb: When Democrats lose, they blame the candidate. When Republicans lose, they blame the opposition.

- Timothy Noah

The thing to strive for is to get paid to talk about yourself.

- Timothy Noah

In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

- Timothy Noah

Sometime, while I wasn't paying attention, trickle-down economics got respectable.

- Timothy Noah

If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.

- Timothy Noah

The Supreme Court needs jurists, not politicians.

- Timothy Noah

Capitalism can't deliver decent health care.

- Timothy Noah

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

- Timothy Noah

Expressing truth is hard work.

- Timothy Noah

Democrats view elections as a means to an end, while Republicans view an election as an end in itself.

- Timothy Noah

Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.

- Timothy Noah

Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.

- Timothy Noah

The idea that the business world's needs get ignored in Washington is perpetuated by business so it can fulfill even more of its needs, real or imagined.

- Timothy Noah

Washington is a place where politics and economics often aren't on speaking terms.

- Timothy Noah

It never fails to astonish me how cheaply a politician can be bought.

- Timothy Noah

When Democrats lose, they're pathetic. When Republicans lose, they're bitter and mean.

- Timothy Noah

Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.

- Timothy Noah

Just about everything I own was made in China. Just about everything you own was made in China, too.

- Timothy Noah

The Reagan years really were a bonanza for the rich; you didn't imagine that.

- Timothy Noah

What people want is big government that they don't have to pay for.

- Timothy Noah