Timothy Noah

Quotes by 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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• The financial services industry is a ward of the state.

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