Quotes from Timothy Noah

Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford's.

The U.S. policy of hoarding crude oil never made the world, or even the U.S., a safer place.

The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.

To cut the federal budget without cutting entitlements is like giving up chocolate-chip cookies and then deciding it's OK to eat the ones that don't have any nuts.

President Obama seems to think that you win by demonstrating that you're a more reasonable person than your opponents. It didn't work too badly, I'll grant, as an electoral strategy in the 2012 election.

The thing to strive for is to get paid to talk about yourself.

Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.

The Bush administration got a lot of things horribly wrong in its disaster response to the New Orleans flood, and it deserves almost all of the bitter recriminations hurled its way.

An orthodox belief in big government's inefficiency cannot coexist with an orthodox belief in private industry's inability to compete with big government.

Conservatives often say that we should care not about equality of outcomes but about equality of opportunity.

Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes.

Expressing truth is hard work.

We Americans love our Constitution so much that we can't bear to change even the stupid parts.

What the 1990s taught the Clinton veterans was that you could 'triangulate' with a GOP-controlled Congress.

The pathological degree to which former Vice President Dick Cheney operated in secrecy led to government abuses that we'll probably spend years learning about.

Being a teacher is back-breakingly difficult work. It is also extremely important work.

Being superintendent or the superintendent's chief of staff is important work, but there's no chance it's as difficult as being a teacher, and I hesitate to say that it's as important.

What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university.

Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich's bidding.

One can imagine nonviolent or minimally violent ways to reduce or eliminate hatred, but there's no mollifying evil.

The gulf between Virginia and Maryland isn't only a function of geography. It's also sociological. Indeed, it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that Maryland suburbanites and Virginia suburbanites constitute two mutually hostile tribes.

We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.

The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.

Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.