Rachel Maddow Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

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.

Rachel Maddow
The American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars. While a tiny fraction of men and women fighting our wars are deploying again and again, civilian life remains pretty much isolated in cost-free complacency.

Rachel Maddow
The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass. Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.

Rachel Maddow
We ought to realize by now (see Korea, see Vietnam, see Afghanistan, see Iraq, see Iran) that deploying the US military, or dealing billions of dollars a year of arms to our ally of the moment that can serve as a regional rival to our enemy of the moment, is not always the best way to make threats go away. Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer, but that doesn't make every international problem a nail.

Rachel Maddow
The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army.... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it.

Rachel Maddow
If you want to achieve immortality, see what you can do about getting yourself turned into a Pentagon program.

Rachel Maddow
The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway.

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

Rachel Maddow