Chris Hayes Quotes & Sayings

Obviously it's easier to grow faster when you are a less developed country than when you are where the U.S. is. — Chris Hayes

After a battle royale debate, the fight between [Marco]Rubio and [Donald]Trump gets ugly. — Chris Hayes

The thing they're trying to stop is 30-million people getting health insurance. That's the substance. — Chris Hayes

What we do know is that the era of climate change is upon us and the extraordinary in California today will become the ordinary of tomorrow. — Chris Hayes

I don't think polarization is some kind of grand distraction. It's real. People have different commitments, believe in different things and principles, different visions of the good life ... but there is also a degree to which all the really big, successful reform movements in the country had extremely bizarre ideological coalitions. — Chris Hayes

Politics is more than policy, right. Like, one thing that has occurred to me is Bernie Sanders is clearly a very adept and able politician, right. But he spent 30 years being a very adept and able politician in an almost entirely white state. — Chris Hayes

Islam does not preach hatred and violence and destruction. — Chris Hayes

I have always viewed thinking about arguing, about questioning, pushing back with, joking, about sharing and discovering the world and the news as enjoyable, the same way that I view watching basketball. — Chris Hayes

We were arguing about what was good to deal with making education fairer, diverse and more American. We were not arguing about where black scientists get a good education. — Chris Hayes

My dream when I was 14 was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in 'The New York Review of Books.' — Chris Hayes

Presented with a challenge to its power, an illegitimate regime will often overreact, driven by the knowledge that all they have is force. — Chris Hayes

White nationalist, white supremacis feel like this is a watershed moment in the history of white supremacy in which something that had been cordoned off to the kind of white supremacist back waters, an idea like banning all Muslims from coming to the country is going to be . — Chris Hayes

The mood, it is fair to say, was reasonably tense. As a result of the conclusion of the ballot, most members are happy that this matter has now been determined. — Chris Hayes

Reading off a Teleprompter is an easy skill to do passably well and a difficult skill to do very well. I still have room for improvement there. I still talk too fast and I'm trying to slow myself down. — Chris Hayes

My disposition as a human being is kind of a go-along-to-get-along person. I tend to trust authority. — Chris Hayes

It is genuinely shocking to me that I'm on a television show. — Chris Hayes

If you want to defend torture, well then go ahead. But please spare me any sermons about the law ever again. — Chris Hayes

There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there's a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler's head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror. — Chris Hayes

Climate change is the biggest governing challenge we face. It's the biggest governing challenge I think we've ever faced. — Chris Hayes

As one [Jeb] Bush supporter told Politico, you might as well light all of this money [for election compaign] on fire. — Chris Hayes

I've written a lot of movies with smoking, and the some of those movies absolutely gloried in the smoking and I wasn't concerned when I wrote them who would see them and how those movies would especially affect young people. — Chris Hayes

Years later Nixon aide John Ehrlichman seemed to offer up a smoking gun when he told a reporter: The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. — Chris Hayes

It's very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words 'heroes.' I feel ... uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. — Chris Hayes

Screenwriting Joe Eszterhas have always talked about the charm of evil. — Chris Hayes

Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality. — Chris Hayes

I grew up in the Bronx. — Chris Hayes

Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror. I've — Chris Hayes

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is. — Chris Hayes

Everyone is now [Donald] Trump. — Chris Hayes

The knock on [Chris] Christie was always the I guy that he was - I felt inordinately talented politician, a smart and in some ways very capable human being, with a personality given toward authoritarianism and bullying and ethical corner-cutting. — Chris Hayes

Why Hollywood has killed so many movie stars with cigarette smoking, with the romanticization of it from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart, all those people had cancer, died of it, and sold cigarettes their whole career. — Chris Hayes

Let's run the experiment. — Chris Hayes

That has to come to an end and end now. No citizen is a second-class citizen in the city of Chicago. If my children are treated one way, every child is treated the same way. — Chris Hayes

There's no real organised body, ... so through the internet people have spread their videos, spread photos, and spread word of a new urban movement. — Chris Hayes

Impossible is a word for other people to use when life scares them. — Chris Hayes

Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about smoking and not talking about cancer. — Chris Hayes

Now, [Donald] Trump has thus far gotten endorsements from illustrious group, that includes Sarah Palin, David Duke, Dennis Rodman, racially profiling birther sheriff, Joe Arpaio, vaping Congressman Duncan Hunter, and just this afternoon, infamous Maine Governor Paul LePage who accused drug dealers with D-Money, Smoothie and Shifty of impregnating white women. — Chris Hayes

I give so much credit to the 'Up' team who created appointment viewing on the weekends for us and some of the smartest conversations on television. — Chris Hayes

For years, right wing outlets like outlets like Fox News and talk radio have been telling their audience day after day that any information coming from outside of conservative media is not to be trusted. — Chris Hayes

One of the main points of the philosophy behind parkour is being able to help people ... To teach them they way themselves, to gain confidence in themselves, building up from simple moves to more complex things, to teach them that they are worthwhile people. — Chris Hayes

Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: 'Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.' — Chris Hayes

Donald Trump is not going anywhere. And we see as calculated as these are, he has a knack for telling a certain segment of a base what they want. — Chris Hayes

Meritocracy is our social ideal, particularly among good liberals. Equality of opportunity, but not of outcome. Not evaluating people by their [outside] features, but by their innate talent and drive. — Chris Hayes

If someone were to say, we should not letting Jews into the country, and people had a reaction against that, would that be the same thing as that kind of toxic political correctness tamping down honest discussion? — Chris Hayes

The [Sarah ]Palin endorsement as sort of vouching for Donald Trump is all about. She is the sort of tribune of not conservatism as ideology. — Chris Hayes

Order is a slippery thing: it's in the eyes of the beholder and the judgments of the powerful. Safety is clearer: it's freedom from violence and intrusion. — Chris Hayes

I think people should be angry at things that are worthy of anger. Injustice is outrageous and deserves outrage. — Chris Hayes

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz did their best Donald Trump impersonation. All three unleashing an unprecedented string of insults and attacks fit more for a barroom than a presidential debate stage. — Chris Hayes

People like bipartisanship not because they like the substance of what bipartisanship produces, but because it reduces the cognitive stress that partisan disagreement creates. If two sides are bitterly arguing over some major piece of public policy, this forces us to choose sides, and for those with weak mastery of the issue or tenuous connections to a specific worldview, it is easy to be stalked by the worry that you're choosing the wrong side: After all, there are a ton of people screaming in righteous indignation that the side you're on is about to destroy the country. — Chris Hayes

And in America, when the state cultivates such fear among relatively empowered white voters, it is enriching uranium for a political nuclear weapon. It — Chris Hayes

some weed here and there, but for the most part people were just partying. — Chris Hayes

Tens of millions of dollars spent, all meant to get Jeb Bush elected president. He currently is polling on average at around 5%. — Chris Hayes

But whatever the academic debate on the topic, Nixon was correct that black Americans "don't want to be a colony in a nation." And yet he helped bring about that very thing. Over the half-century since he delivered those words, we have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn't actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than within. A place where the mechanisms of representation don't work enough to give citizens a sense of ownership over their own government. A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity. A political regime like the one our Founders inherited and rejected. An order they spilled their blood to defeat. THIS — Chris Hayes

The political disfunction that has brought about the shutdown and now threatens default, isn't so much gridlock. It is exposing the fatal flaw in our Constitution and highly distinct system of government. In other words, it's the Constitution's fault. Something truly catastrophic was bound to happen sooner or later. — Chris Hayes

I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I'm wrong about that. — Chris Hayes

When you think about the current present value of the fossil fuel reserves that are on the books, the current fossil fuel companies, the last time that that much wealth was at stake was when the South fought the Civil War, — Chris Hayes

I grew up in a household where we talked politics a lot and argued politics a lot. — Chris Hayes

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise. — Chris Hayes

I got my start in lefty journalism as a labor reporter at 'In These Times', and it's in my blood. — Chris Hayes

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz opened up a new line of attack on Donald Trump, targeting his involvement in Trump University, a for-profit, non-licensed now defunct institution which triggered lawsuits from individuals who claimed they were defrauded by him, as well as a suit alleging fraud from New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman. — Chris Hayes

I think I was a militant smoker, and I felt hemmed in by a wall of political correctness and I think I purposely and militantly put the smoking scenes in the movies. — Chris Hayes

The base that Donald Trump is speaking to are not that conservative, at least not the way conservatives have defined themselves. — Chris Hayes

I've had a dozen people tell me, maybe more, 'What would have happened if Michael Brown had shot and killed Darren Wilson? Do you think he would be free right now? Do you think he would not have been charged by now?' People just see this manifest double-standard in front of them that's coming at the long line of a whole bunch of grievances that have built up over time because of the dynamics of Ferguson and frankly, the dynamics of race in America more broadly. — Chris Hayes

After starting a blood feud with Fox News, something no Republican presidential candidate has dared to do before, [Donald] Trump seems to have successfully undermine the network in the eyes of its core audience with perception of the Fox News brand among Republican adults hitting its lowest point in three years according to a new YouGov survey. — Chris Hayes

What you cannot conquer, circumvent but do not compromise yourself for the sake of the urban jungle, because concrete does not sympathise. — Chris Hayes

You start noticing that people are noticing how you look, and it is a profoundly alienating experience when it first happens, where you go on TV and you say something about some topic of the day, and on the Internet people are like, 'What was up with that shirt?' 'What was up with your hair?' And you think, 'Oh, that's kind of a bummer.' — Chris Hayes

Because we [the USA] are so powerful, our failures resonate more. In some ways, the worst victims of our institutional and elite failures, through the ripple effect of financial crisis and war, aren't Americans. — Chris Hayes

David Frum has been saying - [Donald] Trump is all about conservatism as identity, not conservatism as ideology. — Chris Hayes

The NYPD with the unconditional support of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stopped-and-frisked more black men than there are black men in New York City. Institutionalized racial discrimination in the United States is alive and well. — Chris Hayes

Donald Trump got himself very far to the left. When he was considering running for president in 2000, he was for a 13 percent wealth tax on wealthy people to retire the national debt. — Chris Hayes

The thing with that word "establishment" is a four-letter word in the 2016 politics, so toxic, so pejorative that pretty much no one wants to be associated with it. — Chris Hayes

The Republican Party is officially a dumpster fire. — Chris Hayes

It's not uncommon for revolutions to stem from a radicalized group just outside the circle of power. That's what the French Revolution was all about; that's what the American Revolution was. The question is: Will all those groups, because of the nature of partisan polarization and ideological polarization, just fight each other? Or is there capacity to organize? — Chris Hayes

My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background. — Chris Hayes

Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something. — Chris Hayes

The New York Times and Politico report , as Bush continues to flounder on the campaign trail, backers are placing some of the blame on Right To Rise and its inability to sell their candidate. — Chris Hayes

Donald Trump said it was his idea for [Sarah] Palin to bring up her son at the rally. — Chris Hayes