Thomas Frank Quotes

Quotes about:

• Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.

  Thomas Frank

  School, Government, Democracy

  Thomas Frank (2008). “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule”, p.3, Macmillan

  47 Copy quote

• For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.

  Thomas Frank

  Today, Students, Desperate

  John Summers, Chris Lehmann, Thomas Frank (2014). “No Future for You: Salvos from the Baffler”, p.13, MIT Press

  30 Copy quote

• Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly.

  Thomas Frank

  Running, Thinking, Ugly

  "Rent-a-Womb Is Where Market Logic Leads" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 12, 2009.

  20 Copy quote

• Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad.

  Thomas Frank

  Believe, Government, Natural

  14 Copy quote

• In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers' markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied.

  Thomas Frank

  Hipster, Teenager, Eye

  John Summers, Chris Lehmann, Thomas Frank (2014). “No Future for You: Salvos from the Baffler”, p.113, MIT Press

  16 Copy quote

• Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.

  Thomas Frank

  Promise, Campaigns, Empty

  "Bipartisanship Is a Silly Beltway Obsession" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 22, 2009.

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• As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.

  Thomas Frank

  Trying, Watches, Three

  "Wrecking, Wrecking, Wrecked" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 30, 2008.

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• When done right - or wrong, depending on how you look at it - deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there's no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties.

  Thomas Frank

  Running, Bridges, Meat

  "No Future for You" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 27, 2008.

  11 Copy quote

• People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.

  Thomas Frank

  People, Political, Fundamentals

  Thomas Frank (2007). “What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America”, p.1, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• [The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.

  Thomas Frank

  Prayer, War, School

  "What's the Matter with Kansas?". Book by Thomas Frank, 2004.

  13 Copy quote

• They, the conservatives, are the real outsides, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social "betters" to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.

  Thomas Frank

  Real, Party, Laughing

  "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America". Book by Thomas Frank, June1, 2004.

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• This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It's authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.

  Thomas Frank

  Sunset, Boys, Men

  "Joe Klein’s Turnip Day" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 26, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

• If your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta.

  Thomas Frank

  People, Email, Wikileaks

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

  4 Copy quote

• Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation.

  Thomas Frank

  Leader, Typical, Campaigns

  12 Copy quote

• When the entertainers of the right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call “the Chicago way.”

  Thomas Frank

  Thug, Wings, President

  "The Real Chicago Way" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• We have become a society that can't self-correct, that can't address its obvious problems, that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from.

  Thomas Frank

  Self, Age, Add

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• Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.

  Thomas Frank

  Country, Blood, Support

  "Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 3, 2009.

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• When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling.

  Thomas Frank

  Baby, Pregnancy, Believe

  "Rent-a-Womb Is Where Market Logic Leads" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 12, 2009.

  13 Copy quote

• Republicans run the machine when it's their turn, and then hand the wheel over to Democrats when the public has had enough.

  Thomas Frank

  Running, Hands, Had Enough

  "Welcome to the Blagosphere" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 17, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a 'systemic risk' if they were to fail.

  Thomas Frank

  Risk, Might, Administration

  "The Real Danger of 'One Big Regulator'" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• Public borrowing is costly these days, true, but interest rates on municipal bonds are still considerably lower than those borne by corporate debt.

  Thomas Frank

  Debt, These Days, Interest

  "Toll Roads Are Paved With Bad Intentions" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 3, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source.

  Thomas Frank

  Integrity, Jail, Source

  "Obama Is Right About Fox News" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong.

  Thomas Frank

  Research, Figures, Happens

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. February 18, 2011.

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• Governing was always difficult for conservatives, but as they return to the opposition, they are rediscovering their skill at blame evasion.

  Thomas Frank

  Skills, Return, Blame

  "Richard Perle’s Apologia" by Richard Perle’s Apologia, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 29, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.

  Thomas Frank

  Business, Goal, Rose

  "Wrecking, Wrecking, Wrecked" by Thomas Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. Ocotber 30, 2008.

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