Matt Taibbi Quotes

I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?

Fortunately, no country was ever more suited for anarchist agitation than present-day America.

I was born in 1960 into a more violent America than we had in 2014. We haven't been in such a good place for more than 50 years.

I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.

Human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it … that alone determines revolutionary mental forms

Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing policies is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution, and it would be folly to disregard the causal relation between the two. Yet to assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard of free government.

In America, even revolutions need a commercial sponsor.

I think America is just so in love with conflict.

Reactionary movements can't sustain themselves unless they find something new to catch and burn on.

I want people to be confronted by the brutality of the Antifa movement.

We don't do sensible things. This is America.

Maybe it's just in America, but it seems that if you're passionate about something, it freaks people out. You're considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are.

The teabaggers - do I know every single one of them? No. Can I see that there's a lot of racist bullshit going on? Absolutely. Would it have been welcome to see more of these "anti-government" types around after the stolen election? It would have been good to see it. I wouldn't have liked to see them with their immigrant-bashing and their stupid signs.

I've got a fierce passion for politics but I can't stand the smarmy, hypocritical upper-middle-class dictator nation that prevails and has always prevailed in this country. I'm up for petrol bombers, mate, and fighting in the streets.

America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.

There is, unfortunately, too large a number of people who are just outright bigots in America. They're nowhere near a majority. They're a small number. But there are people who are in the Alt-Right who are just straight up bigots.

I had a feeling about what I wanted to say, and I wasn't really qualified to discuss real things out of America because I didn't grow up there.

In America many things that are interesting are seen as odd.

These Muslim Brotherhood fronts - the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America - we need accountability for what these groups are doing and need to understand that in many ways they are as toxic and dangerous for America as are their violent counterparts, which have exactly the same goal that they do, which is imposing the Shariah doctrine on all of us.

Together, these advocates create a pro-Israeli case so compelling that the idea and reality of Israel has worked itself deep into American culture, politics and foreign policy. Many American Jews refuse to accept it, but the real debate between Israel’s supporters and detractors in America is all but over.

I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.

My urgent advice to you would be, not only always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred. I am sorry for the man who seeks to make personal capital out of the passions of his fellowmen. He has lost touch with the ideal of America. For America was created to unit mankind.

Without real nonviolence, there would be perfect anarchy.

Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.

The one being abhorrent to the powers above the earth and under them is the hyphenated American