Rachel maddow quotes

Part of what the [British] dossier says is this, quote, "The operation", meaning the effort to influence our election, "that has been conducted with the full knowledge and support of [Donald] Trump and senior members of his campaign team. In return, in return, the Trump team has agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue."

I am a woman, and sometimes that impacts what stories I want to do.

[Dan Fried ]is a pillar of the U.S. State Department. He`s part of its institutional memory. He has been in the room for basically every important negotiation, every standoff, every big development, particularly between the United States and Russia for decades.

I realized I was gay when I was a teenager and I couldn't imagine what it meant to be a gay adult. I just did the next thing that seemed right, and that led me from activism to media to the kind of media I'm in now. But I like where I've ended up.

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

Those policies [of Jean-Marie Le Pen ]I find repellent. I believe many people right across consist the world do. There is no future in that type of narrow minded racism and nationalism.

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.

A Russian citizen who worked for the [Donald] Trump campaign manager in Ukraine, worked for Paul Manafort when Manafort was working in Ukraine, that Russian citizen visited the United States around the time of the Republican convention.

When Vladimir Putin runs up against American power and American criticism and American leadership that reminds him of what Russia isn`t, when he runs up against people who he worries are funding his dissidents or supporting protests against him, when he runs up against criticism of the way he runs his own country, what he`s running up against is the State Department.

Six months after 9/11, Jean-Marie Le Pen was almost elected president of France. There were a number of leaders and a number of parties running in the French national elections that year in the spring of 2002. But it ended up being not just a shock across France, and not just a shock across Europe. But it ended up being almost a worldwide shock when in the spring of 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in those national elections. That put him in a two-man runoff for the presidency of France, spring of 2002.

Marine Le Pen is more careful than her dad was about saying things like denying the Holocaust, right? But it`s the same politics. It`s the same modern anti anti-immigrant, anti-and the Semitic, xenophobic authoritarian modern pseudo-fascism.

My idea of what was going on in politics was driven by activism. I came out when I was 17, and right away I started working in the AIDS activist movement. For me, politics was about getting drugs approved and getting prisoners access to the same kind of drugs that you could get on the outside. It was about getting needle exchanges approved. That was politics. These were policy problems that were killing people, and we were trying to get them changed.

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?

There`s a reason people pause their lives to engage in political activism and pressure their local political leaders. Because as a whole, even if you can`t identify any one instance, as a whole pressure works and sometimes it starts with something as simple as pushing the button on the intercom.

If everybody can author their own story, if media is democratizing because everybody can make a really good-looking website... that's the way we learn now instead of in books. It means that more people get to tell their own story in their own terms rather than having to go through publishers and editors and executives.

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.

After [Donald] Trump and his campaign manager both initially denied having anything to do with the platform change, a Trump campaign official now admits that the campaign pushed to soften the Russian language in the platform. It says it was done specifically at Trump`s request.

Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.

[Bob Ferguson] won that huge ruling against the first version of the Muslim ban that resulted in it being stopped dead in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

David Petraeus, the best known American general of his generation. After commanding the American war effort in both Iraq and Afghanistan, he was serving as CIA director when he stepped down suddenly following revelations that he`d had an extramarital affair. That same investigation that turned up evidence of the affair also eventually turned up evidence that General. Petraeus had passed classified information to his mistress.

The way that we make dumb decisions and discriminatory decisions is by employing stereotypes about groups of people. We don't see people as fully human when other people speak for them.

Fascism allegation [to Donald Trump] is not coming from the left. This is coming from the right. It`s coming from inside the Republican Party and from within mainstream conservative thought.

I'm a sarcastic person. I learn through humor.

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.

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.

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.

Fascist is not just an epithet. Fascist is a proper noun that means a specific thing. It`s a real thing. It`s not always referring to ancient history.

Who knows what exactly changed Tom Cotton`s mind. I mean, maybe it was that woman who said her husband was dying and only alive thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Maybe it was the young woman on your right side of your screen who said that without the treatment she could only receive through the Affordable Care Act she herself would be dead.

I like explaining things, and I believe that you can do very high-level explanation on basic cable news provided you are willing to work hard enough to be a good storyteller.

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.

In the rest of the world though, particularly in Europe, the most popular form of racing is not stock cars. It`s not NASCAR. It doesn`t look anything like NASCAR. It`s Formula 1.

I don't feel there's anything about my experience of being gay that gives me more insight into "don't ask, don't tell," for example, than anybody else.

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.

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.

I think of my job on television as explaining things.

Silencing the U.S. State Department, putting a friend of Vladimir Putin`s in charge at the U.S. State Department, who stands by quietly while the State Department gets hollowed out, gets gutted, that`s a dream for the Russian government, right? That`s a dream for Putin.

Chris Christie who proposes accepting Syrian refugee orphans under the age of 5 because they may not be vetted well enough. You can`t trust them. The 5-year-olds might it be terrorists. After all, they`re from Syria.

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

If you're working on better conditions for prisoners, if you make that a popular issue and you invite mainstream media to weigh in on that subject, you're going to end up with a much more regressive public-policy environment than if you approach it in a quieter way. It's not because the public is stupid, it's just that people with only a cursory interest in something are going to have a knee-jerk reaction to it. That's impossible to explain in a cable-news media... it doesn't make sense.

Gay people - generally speaking - have a responsibility to our own community and to future generations of gay people to come out, if and when we feel that we can.

In that first national election after 9/11 in France, Jean-Marine Le Pen did not win the presidency, but he did get to the final round. He was in the general election. Now, this week, in the first national elections in France after what many people have been calling the French 9/11, the attacks in Paris three weeks ago, this time it`s Jean-Marie Le Pen`s daughter, Marine Le Pen and the National Front, which is still a far right pseudo- fascistic party, they came in first place in France.

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.

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.

We all now have to decide whether we`re comfortable using this word, weather fascism is too over the top to use in this context of our politics right now in our country or whether it helps because it`s accurate, to basically describe this as America`s Sir Oswald Mosley moment.

The issues which mattered to me as an activist, mainly things like prison reform and AIDS, have less of a chance of getting covered on my show than things I don't have a personal interest in. It's because I don't trust my antenna about being a good storyteller on those subjects, because I know a lot and therefore lose touch with what the average person might find interesting about them.

I end up liking politicians, both left and right, who talk about political matters as if they are addressing a bunch of adults, as if they are capable of handling both complexity and emotional responsibility.

I think it's both annoying and beneficial that there's so much freedom online.

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.

I would like to be a polyglot.

Here in the United States, when the term "fascist" gets used, it`s either talking about other countries, ancient history or it`s used as a sort of insult, right, a sort of generic right wing epithet that people use to criticize politicians who are at most on the edge of mainstream American political thought.

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

Russian government was in contact with multiple [Donald] Trump campaign sources while they were doing [attacks]. Russian nemesis in the American government, U.S. State Department, CIA, are not faring well since Donald Trump came to power.

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.

It used to be that we disagreed over the basic facts we were fighting over, and we had different opinions about them. Now I think we accept different sources of authority. ... And people can establish credibility on their own say-so as long as nobody follows the trail and calls them out on it.

I don't want to insert myself into the story. I just want to give a useful analysis of it to help people come to their own conclusions.

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

Social security isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s not bankrupting us. It’s not an outrage. It is working.

I feel like I have more in common with conservative people who have activist causes in their hearts and who are interested in electoral politics than I do with somebody who doesn't care, doesn't have any political interests, doesn't know what policy is, and doesn't think any of it matters to them. If you care, we're actually going to have a basis of conversation. We might supplementally get along very well, and that might be complicated and fun in a way that is more constructive than you'd expect.

I still think of myself as the new kid.

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.

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.

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

I don`t think we have thought of ourselves, at least in a modern iteration, as being a nationalist country or a country that has nationalist movements.

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.

I think Obama has been skilled and farsighted in a lot of the stuff that he's done. And in other things, unskilled and not farsighted. On balance I'd say that he is doing most of what he said he'd do.

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

The highest percentage of respondents say that biggest problem in the country is the government. The biggest problem facing our country today is that our government is terrible. Dissatisfaction with the government, problem numero uno by a mile.

For months, the [Donald] Trump campaign denied full stop that anybody associated with their campaign had any ties with Russia or any contacts with Russia full stop.

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.

CNN recently ran a sort of roundup article on why some conservatives say that Trump talk is fascist. The roundup included this tweet from Iowa Republican radio host, very influential guy in Iowa Republican caucuses, Steve Deace. Quote, "If [Barack] Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump, every conservative in the country would call it what it is - creeping fascism."

I feel like Americans have always studied nationalism as a foreign phenomenon. And now, we`ve got a nationalist movement in our country that has a very articulate spokesman in the senior counselor to the president [Donald Trump].

This [British] dossier is still considered to be mostly uncorroborated but it`s overall allegation is that the Trump folks knew, the [Donald] Trump folks knew about the Russian campaign to interfere in our election, they supported it, they cooperated with it, and in exchange, they made promises to the Russians.

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.

[Dan Fried] served under President [Barack] Obama and under President George W. Bush before that and under President [Bill] Clinton before that and under President George H.W. Bush before that and under [Ronald] Reagan before that and under [Jim] Carter before that. He has been there a long time.

We are willing to follow leaders only to the extent we believe they call on our best, not our worst.

The British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley`s group, the black shirts, they were banned in Britain in 1940. And Max Mosley`s dad, Sir Oswald Mosley, ended up spending three years in World War II, 1940 to 1943, interned in the U.K. as basically an enemy of the state. He spent that time in prison, as did Max Mosley`s mother.

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

When people get to speak about themselves and the things that matter to them, on their own terms, we see them as who they are. They can't be reduced to objects of derision.

Don't focus on what I'm wearing. Focus on what's coming out of my face.

There had been a proposed plank for the platform that said the Republican Party believed the United States should support Ukraine in any way that we could up to and including providing them weapons, so they could fight off Russian incursions into Ukraine.That was the proposed plank in the Republican Party platform. The [Donald] Trump folks didn`t care about anything else.

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.

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

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.

[Dan Fried] served six presidents over a 40-year career dating back to the [Jimmy] Carter administration.

Some people feel like stuff just happens to you and you cope as best you can. Some people feel like we can change what happens not only to ourselves but to other people. That's me, and I like that in anybody.

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.

When Conservatives crusade against government while they are trying to be appointed to head the government, I think that's weird!

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.

Sarah Palin is now the guy who hangs out in the high school parking lot, showing off his car, five years after he graduated.

We do have evidence the [Donald] Trump campaign was working to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.

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.

We got the first WikiLeaks publication of documents hacked and stolen by Russian government sources from the DNC, from the Democratic Party, and they started publishing those stolen documents from the DNC right before the Democrats started their convention.Good political timing if you`re trying to help [Donald] Trump and hurt the Democrats.

I will say that Bernie Sanders are the opposite end of the spectrum from Donald Trump. We see him leading right now in the Republican Party in an intractable way.

The idea of the Overton Window is that there`s a fairly narrow window of proposals in any particular policy area that people will take seriously that wouldn`t get you written off as a kook. The way to move or expand that window is to advocate super extreme positions which change the realm of what`s politically possible because after something super nuts has been . floated, thereafter, slightly less nuts positions will start to look acceptable and moderate by comparison.

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.

When you think about me talking to Rick Santorum or Pat Buchanan or one of these old guys, part of what makes that a joyful experience for me is that in my head I'm thinking, He has to talk to me. Like, poor Pat Buchanan, all the things you've done and you end up having to talk to me.

[Dan fried] is the department`s foremost Russia expert and he, too, is now leaving at a time when arguably the State Department needs it most, the State Department will not have the benefit of his insight going forward.

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.

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.

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.

We are starting to see what may be signs of continuing [Russian] influence in our country. Not just during the campaign but during the [Donald Trump] administration, basically signs of what could be a continuing operation. And those two things together are worth paying attention to.

The [Donald] Trump campaign turned on a dime instantly as soon as those WikiLeaks dumps started.

Senator [Tom Cotton] got a ton of blowback. He became the star of fake missing person`s signs, encouraging folks to call if they saw him and also to call him and ask why he had been missing while his constituents were looking for him.

I don't have any option. I'm not going to be less gay or more pretty. I can't try to have less personality or fewer controversial opinions.

Donald Trump announced his no Muslims are allowed to come to the United States plan and that led to one of the greatest tweets of all time from New York Times columnist. Quote, "OK, I concede I picked the wrong day to modestly walk back my Trumpism as fascism column."

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.

With the Republican Party`s presidential front-runner proposing that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, that perhaps there ought to be a national registry of Muslims, that we ought to looking into Muslims having to carry government ID cards that state their religion, now, the word fascist is being used to describe this ascending and leading Republican politician.

I'm not a screamer. I'm confrontational, but I don't think that translates into anger.

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.

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

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

The [Donald] Trump folks chose not to keep [Dan Fried] on. He was actually - I said he was actually the third-most senior diplomat in the foreign service.

I`m not sure, but [Russia] might be happy to see this guy [Dan Fried] exiting stage left.

The downside of playing dumb is that you sound dumb.

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?

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

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.

The primary agency responsible for rallying U.S.-led interests around the world appears to be having the air sucked out of it. If you are Russia and you are looking at that right now, do you love what you are seeing?

There are some political issues where mainstream press attention only hurts. We think about activism as being this generic model of consciousness-raising, then hopefully media attention, attraction of new people to your cause, building public support for your cause, then decision-makers reacting to that change in public opinion. That's true for some types of activism, but it is not true for all of them.

Anything I really want I can find online.

I definitely feel like it took me a while to learn the baseline things you have to do if you want people to hear you. That's why I've had the same haircut for the entire time that I've been on television and that's why I wear literally the same jacket every day. I keep all the clothes I wear on TV in my office on a little hanging rack. My girlfriend calls it all the colors of the German rainbow. Grays, blacks, a slightly greenish gray for the days that I'm feeling particularly festive. I'm not trying to accomplish anything in the way I look other than to be boring enough for people to hear me.

In this country, the most popular form of car racing is the huge multibillion dollar industry that`s called stock car racing. That`s what NASCAR is. That`s what the SC stands for in the middle of NASCAR, Stock cars.

Fascism is not just a word. It`s not just a way to insult someone with whom you disagree. It is a specific thing. It is a specific form of far right politics that involves a sort of narcissistic cult of superman action around the leader of the party.

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.

What's insulting to the American people, the Senate, to this whole process is that the Republicans, with all other nominees, have said Democrats are being obstructionist for wanting to see documents, for wanting to see a paper trail, for wanting to get questions answered in the judiciary committee hearings, and now all of a sudden, the Republicans want those things for this.