Quotes from Timothy Noah

If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.

Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands.

In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

For any politician who didn't enter office a wealthy man, nothing says 'I take bribes' like a Rolex watch.

No man is an island. If you want to blame anybody for poisoning the world with that socialistic idea, blame John Donne.

It never fails to astonish me how cheaply a politician can be bought.

Politicians have such large egos that it usually takes them an inordinately long time to grasp when they've become a pathetic joke.

We live in a diverse nation, but it isn't that diverse. If any one state showed results so dramatically different from the results in each of the other 50 states, the likeliest explanation would be that someone had tampered with the polls.

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

The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.

When a conservative praises a liberal as 'morally serious,' he means that person is less liberal than most.

The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago.

Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.

The worst an ex-con is likely to do if given the right to vote is vote for a Democrat.

Deciding which ideas to save and which ideas to discard is one of society's most important tasks.

I'm all for lifting the payroll-tax cap, if only to make payroll taxes a little less regressive.

GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.

I recognize that Republicans see a moral difference between a dollar taken away from a millionaire in government benefits and a dollar taken away from a millionaire in taxes.

What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.

The GOP doesn't seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative.

Washington culture has always had a difficult time acknowledging untruth.

The $100 bill may be America's most successful export.

The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet.

Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I'm happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery.