Quotes from Timothy Noah

The United States is not, nor has ever been, anything close to a fascist country.

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.

If Romney were a chair, he'd be a squishy, expensively upholstered easy chair that bore the imprint of whoever last sat on it.

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.

Obama is an intelligent man whose life and work experience sensitize him to class distinctions.

If we were to compile a list of the ways in which the United States has made both itself and the wider world a better place, then at or very near the top would be its commitment to universal education.

One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.

If the Pentagon truly confined itself to providing defense, then presumably we wouldn't need a whole separate government agency to provide 'Homeland Security.'

What I've come to believe is that psychological advice isn't worth much if it isn't rooted in personal experience.

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

Was President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage crassly political? God, I hope so.

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

The intriguing aspect of food charges on airlines is that they create the perfect laboratory for any economist who wishes to study the question of how to price a good that possesses, by universal consensus, absolutely no objective value.

Customer service, they say, is dead. Actually, it isn't. It's just hiding behind a call center in Manila.

Without the three-fifths rule, there wouldn't have been a Constitution of the United States - not one that governed the American South, at any rate - because the South wouldn't have ratified it.

When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.

Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it. But we don't acquire wisdom from it.

Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I'm glad to live in a capitalist country.

Creativity seldom thrives in an atmosphere of great discipline or scrutiny. That's one reason we tend not to want our leaders to get too creative.

A thriving middle class is a necessary precondition for a free representative government.

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

The advantage of a market-based national defense is obvious: Every citizen would receive an individualized amount of military protection, based on the value each of us placed on defending the homeland.

There's no shortage of Democrats who are at least as committed as Schwarzenegger to reducing greenhouse gases.