Matt Taibbi Quotes

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Matt Taibbi

Profession : Author

Birth : March 2, 1970

It's increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill.

Matt Taibbi

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

Matt Taibbi

In reality, everybody in Congress is a stand-in for some kind of lobbyist. In many cases it's difficult to tell whether it's the companies that are lobbying the legislators or whether it's the other way around.

Matt Taibbi

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

Matt Taibbi

The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.

Matt Taibbi

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat.

Matt Taibbi

For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them - emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.

Matt Taibbi

It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of control, it's become bigger than the presidency itself.

Matt Taibbi

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington.

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

We may be many things, we Americans, but we always get the job done.

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

Matt Taibbi

There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.

Matt Taibbi

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.

Matt Taibbi