Thom Hartmann Quotes & Sayings

With the help of prominent media outlets, the Royalists, now a political minority, would engage in a scorched-earth strategy to defeat a coming Progressive Revolution, even if it meant crashing the United States as we know it. If they were going down, then the rest of the nation was going down with them.

Which is exactly what happened. — Thom Hartmann

Electric cars have an easy minimum range of 100 miles and a typical range of closer to 200 miles. And the technology is just getting started. We fight wars all over the world for oil, and we don't even need it. That, in and of itself, is insane. — Thom Hartmann

among men and not among angels; among men as intelligent, as determined and as independent as myself, who, not agreeing with me, do not choose to yield up their opinions to mine. Mutual concessions is our only resort, or mutual hostilities."* — Thom Hartmann

Master Stanley used to tell me that what I was doing was nowhere near as important as the place within myself from where I was doing it. For example, a person could be teaching others out of a selfless motive, or out of a desire for power or glory: the former had a positive impact on the world, whereas the latter had a negative impact, even though the same identical teaching may have been imparted. "It's the spirit that's important," he would say. "It's even more important than the act. Going to work in a gas station and providing for your family out of love is more important than creating a mighty religious work out of a desire for glory or power. — Thom Hartmann

In the 1992 presidential debate, third-party candidate Ross Perot famously warned about a 'giant sucking sound' of American jobs going south of the border to low-wage nations once trade protections were dropped.

Perot was right, but no one in our government listened to him.

Tariffs were ditched, and then Bill Clinton moved into the White House...He continued Reagan's trade policies and committed the United States to so-called free-trade agreements such as GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO, thus removing all the protections that had kept our domestic manufacturing industries safe from foreign corporate predators for two centuries. — Thom Hartmann

Dickens knew there were vast reserves of methane hydrate trapped frozen in sea-beds all around the world and wondered what would happen if a lot of that frozen methane on the sea floor had melted from a solid into a gas, and bubbled up from the ocean's depths? Would it be enough to account for the "signature" of carbon-12 that geologists were finding in the rocks associated with the Permian Mass Extinction? So he went back to the lab and melted frozen methane in water warm enough. The results were dramatic. The gas not only dissolved into the water, but it also rose up out of the water and into the air. Dickens published a paper in 1999 suggesting that a 5 degree Celsius increase in ocean temperatures would have been adequate to melt enough methane hydrate crystals to create the Permian carbon-12 signature. And such a massive release of methane, itself a greenhouse gas vastly more potent than CO2, would also trigger a catastrophic, swift warming of the planet. — Thom Hartmann

Poor Fred - he's actually working on a typo, and somebody ought to tell him. Twice in the New Testament Jesus withered fig trees, Isaiah withered a fig tree, and there's another place in the Old Testament - I think it-s in Psalms - where a fig tree was withered. God hates figs, not fags! — Thom Hartmann

Instead of defining a few rights, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84, "Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations. — Thom Hartmann

Most people's major life regrets are not about the things they've done, but about the things they've not done, the goals they never reached, the type of lover or friend or parent they wished they'd been but know they failed to be. — Thom Hartmann

We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people - representative democracy. We have government by plutocracy - the rule of the rich for the rich by the rich," Moyers — Thom Hartmann

And those rights are not to be lightly infringed upon by government in any way. They're explicitly protected by the Constitution from the government. We are, after all, fragile living things that can be suppressed and abused by the powerful. — Thom Hartmann

One of the essential differences between the liberal and conservative worldview is that the liberals believe in rationality, whereas conservative believe that human events are ordered by forces that are beyond the ability of our rational mind to understand or control. — Thom Hartmann

There is no evidence when we look to the past for any precedent for the rate of change in atmospheric composition that we're causing, and the rates of change in climate that we can expect, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate these greenhouse gas concentrations. — Thom Hartmann

Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it — Thom Hartmann

June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled "Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Bankers' " noted, "The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths."107 — Thom Hartmann

The year Reagan was sworn into office, 1981, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world and the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. ... Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world's mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world's largest importer of finished, manufactured goods.

This has resulted in an enormous trade imbalance, one that has grown from a modest $15 billion deficit in 1981 to an enormous $539 billion deficit by 2012. — Thom Hartmann

The most powerful way to change the world is to secretly commit little acts of compassion. You must behave as if your every act, even the smallest, impacted a thousand people for a hundred generations. Because it does. — Thom Hartmann

Trickle down economics creates a nation of peons. — Thom Hartmann

The Constitution doesn't give us rights: it restrains government from infringing on rights we acquire at birth by virtue of being human beings, "natural rights" that are held by "natural persons." The Constitution holds back (restraining government) rather than gives forward (granting rights to people). — Thom Hartmann

Already, there is evidence that crimes are being committed with regard to campaign finance, and the FEC is unable to do anything. — Thom Hartmann

Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women's prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation. Yet over the past century - and particularly the past forty years - corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are, in fact, "persons" and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights. — Thom Hartmann

Other corporations have asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination as well as asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment - passed after the Civil War to strip slavery from the Constitution - protects their right "against discrimination" by a local community that doesn't want them building a toxic waste incinerator, commercial hog operation, or superstore. — Thom Hartmann

A species may eat a particular bacterium, phytoplankton, smaller fish, or plant in an area. Lacking a predator, these species/populations will overgrow and alter the area's biology, overwhelming and driving to extinction dozens or hundreds or thousands of other local species. — Thom Hartmann

We are literally releasing the carbon dioxide that nature had locked up over a hundred million [years] down below the Earth. And we're releasing all that carbon dioxide now at a rate a million times faster [than it accumulated]. — Thom Hartmann

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed. — Thom Hartmann

Black Friday, in reality, is a symptom of the plight that 30 years of Reaganomics has brought to working people in America. Right along with the frenzied rise of shoppers willing to fight each other at retail outlets across America, we've been steadily, for the last 30 years, watching the destruction of organized labor ... of decent pay and wages and conditions for working people ... We have Black Friday today because the wealthy elite have strangled their workers for 32 years, ever since Ronald Reagan's election. — Thom Hartmann

Many people today think that the Tea Act - which led to the Boston Tea Party - was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by the American colonists. That's where the whole "Taxation Without Representation" meme came from.

Instead, the purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade and to exempt the company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea that it was unable to sell and holding in inventory.

In other words, the Tea Act was the largest corporate tax break in the history of the world. — Thom Hartmann

The primary opportunity is to use a model or paradigm for describing ADD that's not disease-based and doesn't imply brain damage or what many children interpret as some type of retardation ... a person must have hope; this model restores self-esteem, thus empowering individuals to change. — Thom Hartmann

His concern was that if there were a few rights specified in the Constitution, future generations may forget that those are just examples and that the Constitution itself protects all human rights. — Thom Hartmann

In the 24 hours since this time yesterday, over 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed in our world. Fully 13 million tons of toxic chemicals have been released into our environment. Over 45,000 people have died from starvation, 38,000 of them children. And more than 130 plant and animal species have been driven to extinction by the actions of humans. And all this just since yesterday. — Thom Hartmann

I hold it to be impracticable"4 to try to define it or any right narrowly in a Bill of Rights. — Thom Hartmann

When the Europeans first arrived in North America, the average depth of the topsoil was 53.34 cm (1¾ ft) and it was rich in the types of symbiotic organisms necessary for plant roots to absorb minerals from the soil. Today North America averages around 15.24 cm (6 in) of topsoil and most if it is exhausted of nutrients and much is devoid of life. — Thom Hartmann

Blessings are the spiritual equivalent of breathing in, and prayer is the spiritual equivalent of breathing out. — Thom Hartmann

the Constitution was designed not to give us rights but to prevent government from taking our rights. — Thom Hartmann

Corporations haven't limited their grasp to the First Amendment; pretty much any and virtually every amendment that could be used to further corporate interests has been fair game. — Thom Hartmann

Both Jefferson and Adams were wary of priests in all forms, as they both knew theocracies are enemies of democracy. Jefferson pointed out that the Indians shared their wariness: — Thom Hartmann

It's estimated that the Arctic, within seven years and maybe as soon as 2015, will have its first ice-free summer in the last 700,000 years (keep in mind that humans have only been on this planet for 165,000 years). Earlier projections predicted ice-free summers as far out in the future as 2080. — Thom Hartmann

An important book for understanding the history of our economic boom & bust cycles. It's an eye-opening account of how we are repeating the mistakes of the 1760's, 1850's, and 1920's. The author is a brilliant writer and is so good at explaining even the most complex subjects in a compelling & easy to understand way. The next crash will be painful but it's important to understand what is being done to us, and how we can learn from history and take action. — Thom Hartmann

So we now know the formula for extinction. Something happens to increase global temperatures five to six degrees, which triggers a melting of the frozen carbon and methane oceanic reserves that then leads to further global warming devastating life on Earth. Thus, the pressing question for us today is this: Can seven billion people on the planet burning fossil fuels imitate the sort of carbon greenhouse gas release caused by the Permian lava flows, or the K/T mass extinction impact or whatever warming caused the PETM? The answer is yes. — Thom Hartmann

It's ironic that the Tea Party populists, most of whom believe that they are furthering the American ideal of "rugged individualism," are supporting mega-corporate-friendly policies like Reaganomics and Clintonomics and are making it very difficult for individuals to be anything other than drones in a giant corporate-run economic machine. And, on the flipside, those countries that call themselves "democratic socialist" in their organization - Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden - actually provide a deep and fertile soil into which entrepreneurs may plant new businesses. — Thom Hartmann

There is more carbon in the atmosphere trapping heat and moisture than ever before in the 165,000 years of human history. — Thom Hartmann

Breaking Big Money's Grip on America is "a brilliant analysis of where we are and where we need to go. Read this book. — Thom Hartmann

the Occupy Movement flared up and began setting up tents in public parks all around the nation, from New York City to Chicago to Seattle. But it actually happened exactly eighty years earlier, when the nation was drowning in President Hoover's Great Depression, and not President Bush's Great Recession. These settlements weren't called "occupations" at the time, they were called "Hoovervilles. — Thom Hartmann

2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation on the First Amendment right of free speech. (Except in certain contract and law enforcement/court situations, it's perfectly legal for human persons to lie in the United States. — Thom Hartmann

Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn't say that corporations are people. The U.S. Constitution wasn't written with that idea; corporations aren't mentioned anywhere in the document or its Amendments. For America's first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said, "No, corporations do not have the same rights as humans." In fact, the Founders were quite clear (as you can see from Hamilton's debate earlier) that only humans inherently have rights. — Thom Hartmann

And so we see people who are spiritually disconnected, living in boxes and driving in boxes, perhaps once a year going "out to nature" to get a small touch of what was once the daily experience of humans. These people seek escape. They sit in urban and suburban homes and feel miserable, not knowing why, experiencing anxiety and fear and pain that cannot be softened by drugs or TV or therapy because they are afflicted with a sickness of the soul, not of the mind. — Thom Hartmann

But Hamilton lost the day, Jefferson won, and we have a Bill of Rights built into our Constitution that, as Hamilton feared, has increasingly been used to limit, rather than expand, the range of human rights American citizens can claim. And because it's in our Constitution, the only way other than a Supreme Court decision to make explicit "new" rights (such as a right to health care) is through the process of amending that document. — Thom Hartmann

Ask how you'd live your life differently if you knew you were going to die soon, then ask yourself who those people you admire are and why you admire them, and then ask yourself what was the most fun time in your life. The answers to these questions, when seen, heard, and felt, provide us with an open doorway into our mission, our destiny, our purpose. — Thom Hartmann

Many people I've met believe that plants are made up of soil-that the tree outside your house, for example, is mostly made from the soil in which it grew. That's a common mistake. That tree is mostly made up of one of the gases in our air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen and oxygen). Trees are solidified air and sunlight. — Thom Hartmann

for one hundred years people have believed that the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad did in fact conclude that "corporations are persons." But this book will show that the Court never stated this: it was added by the court reporter who wrote the introduction to the decision, a commentary called a headnote. — Thom Hartmann