Rachel Maddow Quotes & Sayings

Internet's been down most of the day [at work]. Doing research by just asking everyone what we remember to be true. What could possibly go wrong? — Rachel Maddow

The problem that I think is reasonable to assert about Fox and its coverage is that they make up stories out of whole cloth and then make a big deal out of them. — Rachel Maddow

Formula 1 is a huge international phenomenon even if an otherwise car racing obsessed American public has always found Formula 1 to be a little weird. — Rachel Maddow

The report made a science fiction-like case that the president was within his constitutional rights to reinterpret congressional legislation to conform more closely to his own desires, or to simply refuse to carry out laws with which he did not agree, or that, the report harrumphed, "unconstitutionally encroach on the executive branch." In sum, anything the president doesn't want to do he doesn't have to do; anything he wants to do, consider it done. — Rachel Maddow

I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform. — Rachel Maddow

We do not need to endorse that [agains Muslims]type of activity nor should we. — Rachel Maddow

I think service is honorable, and that was always inculcated in me. — Rachel Maddow

The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine - guns get a pass.
Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost. — Rachel Maddow

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

When Ronald Reagan spoke a thing aloud, he believed it forever and for always. By the time he started running for president, in 1976, he had already developed an unwavering and steadfast faith in the correctness of whatever came out of his mouth. — Rachel Maddow

This isn't a partisan thing - constitutionalists left and right have equal reason to worry over the lost constraint on the executive. Republicans and Democrats alike have options to vote people into Congress who are determined to stop with the chickenshittery and assert the legislature's constitutional prerogatives on war and peace. — Rachel Maddow

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

The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway. — Rachel Maddow

I'm sure other people in the business have considered reasons why they're doing what they're doing, but I do think that if you're gay you have a responsibility to come out. — Rachel Maddow

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter ... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us ... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops. — Rachel Maddow

I still think of myself as the new kid, even though I've been on the air for two and a half years. But my job is the same as it ever was, which is to make 9:00 P.M. as good as I can. — Rachel Maddow

I'm a sarcastic person. I learn through humor. — Rachel Maddow

I don't think vodka is useful. I think it's for people who don't like alcohol, in which case, you probably shouldn't be drinking it. — Rachel Maddow

I am too old to know how to put a naked photograph of myself on the Internet. — Rachel Maddow

I recommend sports, I don't recommend gambling. — Rachel Maddow

The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army ... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it. — Rachel Maddow

Fascist political gatherings tend to encourage or at least expect a little violence around the edges, particularly against counter protesters. — Rachel Maddow

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

We never had an effect well-organized national fascist party in this country. The way they want have had in decades past and in decades present in countries like Britain and France that we think of as such close allies. — Rachel Maddow

Activism is setting a goal of something you would like to be different, and figuring out what would have to change to achieve that goal. It's sort of like math. — Rachel Maddow

Donald Trump removed all doubt. He is running for president as a fascist demagogue. — Rachel Maddow

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

Feminism is itself a challenge. Feminism is a challenge to the way things are in the world. It is by definition an oppositional movement, because it's trying to accomplish something. I've never felt like feminism was a consciousness raising effort in isolation. Everything about feminism is about getting something in the world to get better for women, and to get the world to be less stupid on gender bifurcation terms. I think that feminism over time gets better, or it gets better and worse and better and worse at achieving the goals that it's trying to achieve, but the overall mission stays the same. I guess I don't think of it as feminism versus anti-feminism; I sort of think of it as feminism versus the world. I don't think of it as a competition; there's no winning. In feminism, you're always trying to make stuff better. It's opposition to which you cannot attribute a tally. — Rachel Maddow

If you're someone people count on, particularly in difficult moments, that's a sign of a life lived honorably. — Rachel Maddow

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

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

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

So this is the only TV show in America where I am quite confident that you, the audience, will share my excitement when I tell you that coming up in our next segment, we have the best graph ever. Best graph ever. — Rachel Maddow

Fascistic leaders are aggressively macho and chauvinistic. They are xenophobic about people who they portray as outsiders or some sort of threat to the nation or as weaklings they can denounce. — Rachel Maddow

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

Who knows if John McCain could have won that presidential campaign [2008] in any circumstances when George W. Bush the outgoing Republican president had a 22 percent approval rating. — Rachel Maddow

The umbrella assertion made by Team B - and the most inflammatory - was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates "substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat." Soviet military leaders weren't simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this "grave and dangerous flaw" in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay "the large body of soft data." This "soft" data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included "his deep knowledge of the Russian soul. — Rachel Maddow

It's not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It's the big-ticket stuff too. — Rachel Maddow

One of the manifestations of depression for me is that I lose my will. And I thereby lose my ability to focus. I don't think I'll ever have the day-to-day consistency in my performance that something like This American Life has. If I'm not depressed and I'm on and I can focus and I can think through something hard and without interruption and without existential emptiness that comes from depression, that gives me - not mania. But I exalt. I exalt in not being depressed. — Rachel Maddow

Overall, the United States admits to having lost track of eleven nuclear bombs over the years. I — Rachel Maddow

Ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. That was the whole idea, right? That's why we went. I am reluctant to let that fact disappear down the memory hole, because if - as the war ends, or at least starts to end - if, at this time, the history of the war is written as us going there to topple the regime of a bad man when that frankly isn't why were told that we were going there - Aren't we still at risk of making this horrific mistake again? And, aren't we letting the people who foisted the WMD idea on us, not many years ago, aren't we sort of letting them get away with it? — Rachel Maddow

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

I have learned when two Republicans are talking about legalizing drugs to shut up. — Rachel Maddow

Every popular zillion dollar sport has its share of personal scandals around the sport and its leadership. — Rachel Maddow

I think a lot of people of my generation are discomfited by the assertion of neutrality in the mainstream media, this idea that they're the voice of God. I think it's just honest to say, yes, you know where I'm coming from but you can fact-check anything I say. — Rachel Maddow

The American president just won the nobel peace prize, by any reasonable measure, all Americans should be proud — Rachel Maddow

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong. — Rachel Maddow

At a time when America should be doing everything we can to lead the fight to defeat ISIS and other radical jihadists, Donald Trump is playing right into their hands. — Rachel Maddow

Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed," wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. "While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait ... U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu. ... "Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit. — Rachel Maddow

If you want to make the government take a religious side, then make the case, it should be Christian republic. — Rachel Maddow

If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that's a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that's a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public. — Rachel Maddow

Famously in 1936, Oswald Mosley led a march of his British black shirts through a mostly Jewish neighborhood, in the east end of London. What resulted was what they called the "Battle of Cable Street", where Oswald Mosley and his fascists basically got the snot beaten out of them when East London rose up against them and beat them up. — Rachel Maddow

The downside of playing dumb is that you sound dumb. — Rachel Maddow

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

It is sometimes hard to know what Sarah Palin means, just on a day to day basis. Sometimes it is hard to follow what she is talking about. — Rachel Maddow

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

Gay people exist. There's nothing we can do in public policy that makes more of us exist, or less of us exist. And you guys have been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist, but you don't make any less of us exist. You just are arguing in favor of more discrimination, and more discrimination doesn't make straight people's lives any better. — Rachel Maddow

When it starts to seem like you have popped into bed with a specific party, it makes it difficult for people to believe you are not doing someone else's bidding for them. — Rachel Maddow

It matters that there's diversity on the court. I think it makes for better lawmaking, because you have people with more diverse range of judgment and who are going to make a better decision on the law. — Rachel Maddow

Abstinence-only education - the best STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) and pregnancy delivery system that politicians have ever devised. — Rachel Maddow

"Red Dawn" was a movie made in 1984 I think about World War III. If you have not seen it and plan on watching it, you want to close your eye and cover your ears but not really. You can figure it out. — Rachel Maddow

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS. — Rachel Maddow

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

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

I loved being on the radio. Being paid to talk? It's like being paid to eat. — Rachel Maddow

Social security isn't a ponzi scheme. It's not bankrupting us. It's not an outrage. It is working. — Rachel Maddow

I think Donald Trump is now kind of in love with the idea of becoming president of the United States. I think he truly does believe that he can be the Republican nominee. — Rachel Maddow

It is hard to know what Sarah Palin means in Republican politics anymore. — Rachel Maddow

" [Donald] Trump may indeed be a little fascistic."New York Times wrote. — Rachel Maddow

[To Timothy LaHaye:] So, Mr. LaHaye, when the Rapture happens, can I have your stuff? — Rachel Maddow

People who disagree on important issues don't agree on the facts. — Rachel Maddow

After we graduate tonight, we no longer have to let society happen to us. We get to create our own. — Rachel Maddow

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

There is no news value to the content of those [Newtown 911] tapes. The actual audio is of no news value at all, unless you want the thrill of hearing the sound of the actual individual gunshot that might have killed a 7 year-old. — Rachel Maddow

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

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

But there's a reason that we have different laws for juveniles than we do for adults. And it's because kids are not liable for the things they do in the way that adults are, because we think that kids are different. — Rachel Maddow

There's no way to tweak your content in order to goose ratings. You do what you're good at and let people follow you. — Rachel Maddow

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

By 2001, even the peacetime US military budget was well over half the size of all other military budgets in the world combined. — Rachel Maddow

I'd rather have none at all than a grain too much. — Rachel Maddow

The American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars. While a tiny fraction of men and women fighting our wars are deploying again and again, civilian life remains pretty much isolated in cost-free complacency. — Rachel Maddow

I like big drinks that aren't afraid of the alcohol in them. Not big in size, but in flavor, and the way I can allow myself to enjoy them is by making them in very small quantities. I make tiny glasses of very big drinks. — Rachel Maddow

I wish every Republican wanted to impeach [Jeorge W.] Bush , but people don't agree with this. He's stating a fact about what he believes. — Rachel Maddow

Sarah Palin uses me as a laugh line in her stump speeches. If you're willing to turn me into a joke, you should also be willing to talk to me. — Rachel Maddow

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

My life is better with every year of living it. — Rachel Maddow

I feel that gay people not being able to get married for generations, forever, meant that we came up with alternative ways of recognizing relationships. And I worry that if everybody has access to the same institutions that we lose the creativity of subcultures having to make it on their own. And I like gay culture. — Rachel Maddow

If you want to achieve immortality, see what you can do about getting yourself turned into a Pentagon program. — Rachel Maddow

Sarah Palin is backing in be to Republican presidential politics in a big way with a big high profile endorsement decision.That is, I think, probably going to cause a lot of upset in one particular part of the Republican establishment. — Rachel Maddow

If the colonists hadn't rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn't exist. — Rachel Maddow

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

Forced federal registration of U.S. citizens based on religious identity is fascism, period. Nothing else to call it. — Rachel Maddow

If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later. — Rachel Maddow

Pentagon dollars are essentially seen as a different kind of funding that doesn't have to stand for itself and make an argument for itself in the house of Congress. — Rachel Maddow

As secretary of state you can go out in a helmet if you want to. Even in Switzerland in front of reporters. — Rachel Maddow

Flint and its lead contaminated water are now the focus of sustained national attention including political attention. — Rachel Maddow

The single best thing about honesty is that it requires no follow-up. — Rachel Maddow

Military preparedness is absolutely a form of strength. — Rachel Maddow

We have built something [a nuclear stockpile] bigger than we can drive. — Rachel Maddow