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Pride and Prejudice
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet
Of Mice and Men
Frankenstein

Pride and Prejudice
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet
Of Mice and Men
Frankenstein

Thomas Frank Quotes

Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.

– Thomas Frank

I was never a fan of Barack Obama’s bipartisanship routine.

– Thomas Frank

Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles; elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.

– Thomas Frank

Public borrowing is costly these days, true, but interest rates on municipal bonds are still considerably lower than those borne by corporate debt.

– Thomas Frank

Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.

– Thomas Frank

Financial regulation is the next item on the political horizon, and it doesn’t have to be the deathly dull wonk-battle that it sounds like. In fact, if the Democrats do their job, it can just as easily become a platform for addressing the greatest issues of them all.

– Thomas Frank

The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat – to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.

– Thomas Frank

Massive inequality, we have learned, isn’t the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it’s also profoundly ugly.

– Thomas Frank

For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.

– Thomas Frank

When the entertainers of the Right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call ‘the Chicago way.’

– Thomas Frank

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful – isn’t even a city, really – unless it can lay claim to being ‘vibrant.’

– Thomas Frank

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama’s Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists’ Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

– Thomas Frank

Republicans run the machine when it’s their turn, and then hand the wheel over to Democrats when the public has had enough.

– Thomas Frank

Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish.

– Thomas Frank

To be sure, we should all eat right, brush our teeth, and cut down on sweets, but that will hardly help us if we’re born with a condition that requires expensive treatment.

– Thomas Frank

The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.

– Thomas Frank

Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen.

– Thomas Frank

A president aiming for ‘Great’ or ‘Near Great’ status must do more. He must give lots of interviews, make records accessible, and heap the flattery on academia – each of which Mr. Bush has signally failed to do.

– Thomas Frank

As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.

– Thomas Frank

Most of Roosevelt’s innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.

– Thomas Frank

Allowing a private rather than a public entity to take over your toll road merely means that your tolls will have to be that much higher to cover their more expensive debt.

– Thomas Frank

Maybe that first, gigantic deficit the Reaganites piled up was an accident, just a combination of deluded ‘supply side’ tax cuts and a huge bag of good stuff for the Pentagon. But pretty quickly conservatives discovered that deficits, when done correctly, did something really cool: deficits defunded the Left.

– Thomas Frank

A lot of populists after populism died just became socialists. At the beginning of the 20th century, socialism looked like it was going to take off. It didn’t, of course, but a lot of people thought it was going to.

– Thomas Frank

Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.

– Thomas Frank

Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.

– Thomas Frank

The Obama administration’s plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a ‘systemic risk’ if they were to fail.

– Thomas Frank

These days, of course, the focus of talk about popular liberation through products is mostly associated with the Internet. I’ve been collecting computer ads and ads dealing with Internet industries.

– Thomas Frank

There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source.

– Thomas Frank

Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.

– Thomas Frank

I was in a bad mood when I wrote that.

– Thomas Frank

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