Rachel Maddow Quotes

A handkerchief can never be put in another pocket after it has been in one pocket. I don't walk under ladders. I have items of clothing that are lucky for me. That rotates, but I am luck-oriented.

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong.

If you're someone people count on, particularly in difficult moments, that's a sign of a life lived honorably.

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS.

Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.

I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.

Hopefully life is long. Do stuff you will enjoy thinking about and telling stories about for many years to come. Do stuff you will want to brag about.

I really believe in trying to increase the amount of useful information in the world and in being accurate in the sense that you can take what I say to the bank, even if you disagree with me.

Bernie Sanders are the only person who talks about the kinds of things that might be driving people to support Donald Trump in such large numbers in the Republican Party.

Activism is setting a goal of something you would like to be different, and figuring out what would have to change to achieve that goal. It's sort of like math.

If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you'd be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here.

Pentagon dollars are essentially seen as a different kind of funding that doesn't have to stand for itself and make an argument for itself in the house of Congress.

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a 'Public Safety Complex' around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station.

After we graduate tonight, we no longer have to let society happen to us. We get to create our own.

If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later.

It is sometimes hard to know what Sarah Palin means, just on a day to day basis. Sometimes it is hard to follow what she is talking about.

I still think of myself as the new kid, even though I've been on the air for two and a half years. But my job is the same as it ever was, which is to make 9:00 P.M. as good as I can.

Fascistic leaders are aggressively macho and chauvinistic. They are xenophobic about people who they portray as outsiders or some sort of threat to the nation or as weaklings they can denounce.

At a time when America should be doing everything we can to lead the fight to defeat ISIS and other radical jihadists, Donald Trump is playing right into their hands.

My life is better with every year of living it.

Don't focus on what I'm wearing. Focus on what's coming out of my face.

When people get to speak about themselves and the things that matter to them, on their own terms, we see them as who they are. They can't be reduced to objects of derision.

[Donald] Trump is a fascist and that's not a term I use loosely or often but he has earned it.

Fascism allegation [to Donald Trump] is not coming from the left. This is coming from the right. It's coming from inside the Republican Party and from within mainstream conservative thought.

In the rest of the world though, particularly in Europe, the most popular form of racing is not stock cars. It's not NASCAR. It doesn't look anything like NASCAR. It's Formula 1.

We are willing to follow leaders only to the extent we believe they call on our best, not our worst.

Abstinence-only education - the best STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) and pregnancy delivery system that politicians have ever devised.

I think it's both annoying and beneficial that there's so much freedom online.

The single best thing about honesty is that it requires no follow-up.

Donald Trump removed all doubt. He is running for president as a fascist demagogue.

Fascist is not just an epithet. Fascist is a proper noun that means a specific thing. It's a real thing. It's not always referring to ancient history.

Social security isn’t a ponzi scheme. It’s not bankrupting us. It’s not an outrage. It is working.

The more you push back on Donald [Trump], whether you're in the media or whether you are in the GOP establishment, the stronger his base of support comes.

I would like to be a polyglot.

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.

The way that we make dumb decisions and discriminatory decisions is by employing stereotypes about groups of people. We don't see people as fully human when other people speak for them.

Sarah Palin uses me as a laugh line in her stump speeches. If you're willing to turn me into a joke, you should also be willing to talk to me.

I don't think about people watching me on TV. I think it would stress me out.

David Jolly is the only Republican I could find who's really saying Donald Trump, you're out, forget it, this is unacceptable, this is beyond the pale.

I will say that Bernie Sanders are the opposite end of the spectrum from Donald Trump. We see him leading right now in the Republican Party in an intractable way.

If the colonists hadn't rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn't exist.

[Bob Ferguson] won that huge ruling against the first version of the Muslim ban that resulted in it being stopped dead in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

I have learned when two Republicans are talking about legalizing drugs to shut up.

Ben Carson also denounced [Donald] Trump's ban all Muslims proposal saying we do not and would not advocate being selective on one's religion.

It's not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It's the big-ticket stuff too.

I like explaining things, and I believe that you can do very high-level explanation on basic cable news provided you are willing to work hard enough to be a good storyteller.

For months, the [Donald] Trump campaign denied full stop that anybody associated with their campaign had any ties with Russia or any contacts with Russia full stop.

When it starts to seem like you have popped into bed with a specific party, it makes it difficult for people to believe you are not doing someone else's bidding for them.

If you have to hire paid actors to impersonate people who politically support you, people don't actually natively politically support you. You are not a political animal that exists in nature.

I still think of myself as the new kid.