Matt Quotes

America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.

Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.

Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.

This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it.

In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years.

Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.

Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way.

America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That's one of the things we're probably known for around the world, I would imagine.

I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work.

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues.

One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we’ve developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship.

Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

It may be that America has become too big and complicated for most people to deal with being part of. People are longing for a smaller, stupider reality.

The problem with the Tea Party is that it's been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that's counter to their own interests.

If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing.

The Congressional Record will forever show that [Obamacare] was passed in a romper room of overgrown children seemingly barely old enough to keep from peeing on themselves.

America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements.

I get the cynicism thing all the time, although I don't really know where that comes from, because I think I'm actually the opposite of a cynic.

Having lived in a collapsed empire before - I lived in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed - you can see a lot of the classic signs of an empire that's on its way out.

Yeah, I'm a fan of the Blue Jays. It's hard. My sports interest has definitely decreased since we've been on the road. It's really hard to follow.

Honestly I don't like to write songs that often, only when I feel like I need to and when I've got something that I really want to sing about.

Patriotism is a joke in the UK.

Youth is so cynical. There's never anything to believe in as a teen.

Even that word depends on what you mean by pop. I mean, pop music has currency. It could just be about that girl who's in love with you.

I think there's real currency in pop culture.

There's so much that you can do if you mimic your style to a drum machine. I think that's far more exciting.

I don't really believe in the use of drum machines live.

You can't help hearing things that are popular when you're young and impressionable.

There's too much rock that relies a fetishism or nostalgia for the old ways. That's a real enemy to music.

I'm not excited when bands strip things down. I'm not excited by the White Stripes.

I'm finding it hard to listen to other rock bands. It's been hard for me for a long time, but now I can't listen to any new bands at all.

You want to reach people on a real level and have a fan base that understands you.

I want the words to be read in conjunction with the music.

It's frustrating that people attribute something to certain songs and that's not what they're about at all.

I feel that's important that I have some place to go that isn't on the cover of a magazine. I signed up to make music.

I have a real problem with rock music because it seems that lineage doesn't really exist.

When you grow up, you're told that rock 'n' roll is the only authentic way to express yourself. Live instrumentation, singer, live drums. You're told that's the best medium to communicate.

Ralph Lauren and Valentino have a lot of common. Ralph Lauren was one of the first really to put himself at the center of the story, and Valentino was even earlier.

What we found is that Valentino is actually a tremendous star - almost a movie star, really, because he plays himself all the time. The camera loves him.