Chris Hayes Quotations

Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something.

I think people should be angry at things that are worthy of anger. Injustice is outrageous and deserves outrage.

Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: 'Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.'

Reading off a Teleprompter is an easy skill to do passably well and a difficult skill to do very well. I still have room for improvement there. I still talk too fast and I'm trying to slow myself down.

My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background.

I have always viewed thinking about arguing, about questioning, pushing back with, joking, about sharing and discovering the world and the news as enjoyable, the same way that I view watching basketball.

You start noticing that people are noticing how you look, and it is a profoundly alienating experience when it first happens, where you go on TV and you say something about some topic of the day, and on the Internet people are like, 'What was up with that shirt?' 'What was up with your hair?' And you think, 'Oh, that's kind of a bummer.'

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

I give so much credit to the 'Up' team who created appointment viewing on the weekends for us and some of the smartest conversations on television.

I got my start in lefty journalism as a labor reporter at 'In These Times', and it's in my blood.

It is genuinely shocking to me that I'm on a television show.

My disposition as a human being is kind of a go-along-to-get-along person. I tend to trust authority.

My dream when I was 14 was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in 'The New York Review of Books.'

I grew up in a household where we talked politics a lot and argued politics a lot.

If they're really hot, we have to keep going to them. It's good to have them step up because other guys might have off nights.

We try to get it to the inside as much as we can because that really gets our offense going.

I think of it as a step forward. Because we were down a little bit, we brought it back to within three, and we had a chance to tie it. But I know we can do a lot better than that.

We could have gone out and contested more. If we put a hand up on half of those shots, they'll miss half of them.

We didn't really talk or anything or say we're going to come out with more fire. We just know we have to pick it up.

We're losing that drive that we had in the beginning. We were more hungry.

We want to go into every game being competitive. We don't want to go into games thinking about last year's record. We might lose a couple games, but I don't want people to say 'Here we go again. Same thing.' We need support from the crowd.

Our defense needs to really improve more. If we had a little more fire we'd challenge a little more of their shots.

Once you start thinking about growth of economy, it`s hard to think about anything else.

It`s the nature of cable news that we [TV hosts] do a lot of clipping and quoting of other broadcasts and outlets, sometimes to make a narrative point, sometimes to make a political one, and sometimes just to make a joke.

It's not uncommon for revolutions to stem from a radicalized group just outside the circle of power. That's what the French Revolution was all about; that's what the American Revolution was. The question is: Will all those groups, because of the nature of partisan polarization and ideological polarization, just fight each other? Or is there capacity to organize?

I don't think polarization is some kind of grand distraction. It's real. People have different commitments, believe in different things and principles, different visions of the good life ... but there is also a degree to which all the really big, successful reform movements in the country had extremely bizarre ideological coalitions.

The [Hillary] Clinton campaign posted a pretty clever online quiz that makes a similar point with the Republican presidential field. Who said it? Donald Trump or not Donald Trump? For example, quote, "I mean you can prove you are a Christian. You can`t prove it, then you err on the side of caution." That was not Donald Trump. It was this guy, who strongly denounced Trump`s proposed Muslim ban but supports a religious test for refugees.

There is no evidence that government under Republicans will shrink. It`s simply a question of what the government will do and who will benefit.

If someone were to say, we should not letting Jews into the country, and people had a reaction against that, would that be the same thing as that kind of toxic political correctness tamping down honest discussion?

Ted Cruz who`s been gaining on [Donald] Trump in Iowa and is polling ahead of him in the latest Monmouth poll would be quite reluctant to criticize Trump`s plan saying simply it is not his policy.

The person that always wins, that`s the other thing. The monkey picking stocks always wins.

Because we [the USA] are so powerful, our failures resonate more. In some ways, the worst victims of our institutional and elite failures, through the ripple effect of financial crisis and war, aren't Americans.

Obviously it's easier to grow faster when you are a less developed country than when you are where the U.S. is.

Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn't mean they are right, that doesn't mean there is isn't a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.

Meritocracy is our social ideal, particularly among good liberals. Equality of opportunity, but not of outcome. Not evaluating people by their [outside] features, but by their innate talent and drive.

We don`t have a manufacturing base. We don`t have a middle-class jobs growing at all. All we have is a few rich people and a service industry to service them.

I also love lifestyles of the rich and famous and guess what? It`s not unusual for me to sit in bed with my laptop and glass of wine, clicking through real estate slide shows on the New York Times website; looking at ungodly expensive homes I could not ever possibly afford.

We were arguing about what was good to deal with making education fairer, diverse and more American. We were not arguing about where black scientists get a good education.

As long as there have been people in California, there have been people obsessed with California`s water. Scientists say the state is at its driest point in half a millennium and as any Californians will tell you, it is not just their problem, it`s everyone`s problem.

California became the last state in the west to regulate groundwater usage. The state`s first-ever mandatory water restrictions soon followed.

What we do know is that the era of climate change is upon us and the extraordinary in California today will become the ordinary of tomorrow.

Why Hollywood has killed so many movie stars with cigarette smoking, with the romanticization of it from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart, all those people had cancer, died of it, and sold cigarettes their whole career.

I've written a lot of movies with smoking, and the some of those movies absolutely gloried in the smoking and I wasn't concerned when I wrote them who would see them and how those movies would especially affect young people.

I think I was a militant smoker, and I felt hemmed in by a wall of political correctness and I think I purposely and militantly put the smoking scenes in the movies.

Screenwriting Joe Eszterhas have always talked about the charm of evil.

None of us were prepared to hear what Justice Scalia said, because in essence what he was saying is let`s go back to pre-Board of Education - Brown versus Board of Education, 1950s America where blacks are doing all right going to black schools or schools where blacks go. He said go to less advanced schools where they do all right. We`re going back to separate but equal.

That has to come to an end and end now. No citizen is a second-class citizen in the city of Chicago. If my children are treated one way, every child is treated the same way.

We`re in an historic drought, and that demands unprecedented action.

There was a man named Robert Dear who in court said he was a warrior for the babies, whose ex-wife talked about his Christian beliefs motivating his desire to attack and murder three people, including a police officer, in Colorado.That man is a Christian. He`s an avowed Christian. He appears to have acted on those Christian beliefs to undertake that act of violence.

Islam does not preach hatred and violence and destruction.

I was looking, a piece in the "L.A. Times" about a paper called "The Menace" back in 1915, that was railing against Catholics and it said all sorts of things about them. They are essentially a fifth column. They are crypto fascists, that they said if we were compelled to live in this term with Romanists, that`s their term of Catholics, the Romanists will have to be taught their place in. Was that bigotry or were they correct back then to look at Catholicism as fundamentally alien and threatening to the American way of life?

I can cite a chapter and verse of literature at the times saying Italians don`t speak our language, these folks coming from other places - it sounds identical to what you are saying about Muslims now. It really does.

I`ve been spending a fair amount of time in the recesses of white nationalist, white supremacist social media online areas, what called itself is the "alt right", which is sort of the euphemistic term they use for what is essentially modern day white supremacy. And they are some of [Donald]Trump - this has been reported from the beginning but they are very excited about [anti-Muslim] proposal.

White nationalist, white supremacis feel like this is a watershed moment in the history of white supremacy in which something that had been cordoned off to the kind of white supremacist back waters, an idea like banning all Muslims from coming to the country is going to be .

Donald Trump is not going anywhere. And we see as calculated as these are, he has a knack for telling a certain segment of a base what they want.

One young man asked me a simple question that gets to the core of what we`re talking about. He said, do you think the police would ever treat you the way they treat me? And the answer is, no. And that is wrong. And that has to change in this city.

I think is interesting is that term is so pejorative or understood to be so pejorative and there`s a real difference between how Republicans, it seems to me, think of that and how Democrats do. I don`t think Democrats feel as negatively about the Democratic Party establishment as Republicans do feel about their party`s establishment.

I think politically there is less juice to be squeezed out of that orange in the Democratic side. I mean, my feeling is your median Democratic voter, they`re angry at the banks or they`re not psyched about companies that outsource and things like that.

With all the talk of socialism among Democrats on the campaign trail lately, there are actually quite a few people on the right looking at how resources and capital are currently distributed in this country of ours and thinking, you know, there`s got to be a better way.

The New York Times and Politico report , as Bush continues to flounder on the campaign trail, backers are placing some of the blame on Right To Rise and its inability to sell their candidate.

Politico reports, multiple advisers to the Right To Rise super Pac concede privately that the $40 million spent on positive ads aimed at telling Bush`s story yielded no tangible dividends.

Tens of millions of dollars spent, all meant to get Jeb Bush elected president. He currently is polling on average at around 5%.

Donald Trump got himself very far to the left. When he was considering running for president in 2000, he was for a 13 percent wealth tax on wealthy people to retire the national debt.

Donald Trump said it was his idea for [Sarah] Palin to bring up her son at the rally.

There are a variety of groups, Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Sierra Club, that are groups that do very good work, that do a lot of things that I personally believe in, that are also as a descriptive matter they`re part of what you`re going to call an establishment in Washington of the sort of center-left probably, Center for American Progress. They are part of it.

The thing with that word "establishment" is a four-letter word in the 2016 politics, so toxic, so pejorative that pretty much no one wants to be associated with it.

The [Sarah ]Palin endorsement as sort of vouching for Donald Trump is all about. She is the sort of tribune of not conservatism as ideology.

In a radio interview [Ted] Cruz compared [Donald]Trump`s behavior to schoolyard children throwing taunts at each other, vowing not to take part.

That`s a maple leaf, Canadian, not just for being too European but too Canadian. Not so subtly putting [Ted] Cruz`s face inside that maple leaf there.

I`m a big fan of Donald Trump`s.

There`s a line of thinking about Ted Cruz.

People in the media often tend to assume it`s like Trump and [Ted] Cruz fighting over the same voters but when you look at the people who say they`re voting for Donald Trump he does as well with voters who describe themselves as moderate or liberal as he does with voters who themselves as very conservative. So, not all the Trump base would go to Cruz as a second choice.

There`s that issue of if you attack someone you don`t know where the votes are going to go.

David Frum has been saying - [Donald] Trump is all about conservatism as identity, not conservatism as ideology.

It doesn`t really matter what policy you`re for, so long ease gets your gut-level anger about whatever. So, you can`t attack Donald Trump on policy.

The Republican Party is officially a dumpster fire.

After a battle royale debate, the fight between [Marco]Rubio and [Donald]Trump gets ugly.

A Republican primary race that has for months alternated between spectacle and abomination has over the past 20th hours ignited into a raging, full-blown dumpster fire. One stoke by a group of men who hope to become the most powerful person in the world.

The knock on [Chris] Christie was always the I guy that he was - I felt inordinately talented politician, a smart and in some ways very capable human being, with a personality given toward authoritarianism and bullying and ethical corner-cutting.

I`ve seen all this tussling about what is [Donald] Trump ideologically and Jim Carney said he`s a liberal and people saying, look, he`s winning moderates. Chris Christie is an example of this.

The reality is [Donald] Trump is just better at this game than they are. Blaming the media may be a convenient foil, but the reality is, he`s played the free media game better than they have. He has used the personal attack meme against them and literally created memes about them. They need to figure out how to play this game.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz opened up a new line of attack on Donald Trump, targeting his involvement in Trump University, a for-profit, non-licensed now defunct institution which triggered lawsuits from individuals who claimed they were defrauded by him, as well as a suit alleging fraud from New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman.

Trump University is just one of the many lines of attack that were opened up last night, giving a preview of what`s to come in the general if [Donald] Trump is indeed the Republican nominee.

We got the clearest picture of Donald Trump`s weaknesses and liabilities in a general election. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally gave up on trying to convince Republican primary voters that Trump is not a real conservative, attacks that have failed to resonate.

[Marco] Rubio, in particular, focused on something far more elemental. Trump`s character and record as a businessman, and in the process perhaps added a few chapters to the Democrat`s play book against [Donald] Trump.

According to "Huffington Post", one Democratic opposition research firm said they spent the past eight months compiling material on [Donald] Trump as he`s risen on the ranks. And that research estimated that if the all material compiled, court and property records,newspaper clips and video, approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.

David Roberts, who is a writer at Vox who I like, had a line about the voter - your voters weren`t locked in the room with you, Republican establishment. You were locked in the room with them.

I mean,[Marco] Rubio, he`s having fun. I`ve got to say I`ve never seen him enjoy himself out there so much. He`s found way to get under his skin. So, he`s found way to look like he`s somebody that is a force, which has hasn`t so far.

Maybe it`s a great blow for feminism that we now have men mocking one another about their makeup. I mean, let`s - can we enjoy that? That`s kind of great.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz did their best Donald Trump impersonation. All three unleashing an unprecedented string of insults and attacks fit more for a barroom than a presidential debate stage.

Like Trump`s presidential bid, the Brexit campaign has been driven largely by fears of cultural penetration, immigrant invasion, and the genuine crisis of Middle East refugees dying to get into Europe, all channeled into a kind of inward-turning form of ethno-nationalism.

What the issue here is, you get rid of all the conservative orthodoxy about capital gains, marginal tax rate, supply side economics, you just throw all that out the window, limited government and you just embrace the sheer and raw politics of resentment that have been bubbling the whole time and that`s what you get. You get Donald Trump.

Everyone is now [Donald] Trump.

Chris Christie travelled to Ft. Worth, Texas, to give his blessing to a former rival who one week ago was approvingly discussing killing Muslim terrorists with bullets smeared in pig`s blood.

I remember reading an article about this idea of borderline personality disorder, which is reality producers try the find people who are sort of flamboyantly anti-social in these certain ways, because what happens when you put them around other people is they drag everyone down to their level. I feel like I`m watching this disgraceful race to the bottom.

Now, [Donald] Trump has thus far gotten endorsements from illustrious group, that includes Sarah Palin, David Duke, Dennis Rodman, racially profiling birther sheriff, Joe Arpaio, vaping Congressman Duncan Hunter, and just this afternoon, infamous Maine Governor Paul LePage who accused drug dealers with D-Money, Smoothie and Shifty of impregnating white women.

Politics is more than policy, right. Like, one thing that has occurred to me is Bernie Sanders is clearly a very adept and able politician, right. But he spent 30 years being a very adept and able politician in an almost entirely white state.

I think a lot of Democrats I know, who will vote in the Democratic primary and vote for the Democratic nominee and later general, they go back and forth between two feelings. One is oh, my God, I`m terrified. Maybe this guy will be formidable in a general.

You see a lot of fear among Republicans. Oh, man, this guy [Donald Trump] has a lot of vulnerabilities and weaknesses that`s not been tested at all yet.