Jim Hightower Quotations

You can't do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force.

The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate excesses.

The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

The only difference between a pigeon and the American farmer today is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere.

There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

It's hard for the donkeys to win the race if they're going to carry the elephants on their backs.

If you can't be a populist in Arkansas, you ain't going to be a populist in Washington.

The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages.

What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays' Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.

There's enormous progressive activism and, more often than not, success at the grassroots level - everything from living wage campaigns to efforts to finance our elections are having terrific success.

The corporations don't have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government.

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.

So now is the time, more than ever, for those who truly value all the principles of democracy, especially including dissent, to be the most forceful in speaking up, standing up and speaking out.

If you don't speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?

Even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.

Little ol' boy in the Panhandle told me the other day you can still make a small fortune in agriculture. Problem is, you got to start with a large one.

But the good news is that out in the countryside, just about every place that's got a zip code has somebody or some group of people battling the economic and political exclusion that Wall Street and Washington are shoving down our throats.

Democracy is not something that happens, you know, just at election time, and it's not something that happens just with one event. It's an ongoing building process. But it also ought to be a part of our culture, a part of our lives.

Populism is not a style, it's a people's rebellion against the iron grip that big corporations have on our country - including our economy, government, media, and environment.

But, as my mother used to tell me, two wrongs don't make a right. But I soon figured out that three left turns do.

The Bible declares that on the sixth day God created man. Right then and there, God should have demanded a damage deposit.

What's new is that the White House itself has now been corporatized. It's not politicians working for the corporate interests. They are the corporate interests. That's where Bush came from, and Cheney and Rumsfeld.

It's hard to believe President George Bush gave a speech in New Orleans about disaster recovery and failed to mention the word 'farm' or the word 'rural.'

This is a matter of public health. The public was sick and tired of DeLay and his corruption.

Well, I've been in the political arena all of my life, and 10 years of that as a candidate and elected official, and that's about enough.

The good news, though, is that I find in my political travels that people, as regular citizens, are more interested than ever in getting together and having discussions. They want to hear about other viewpoints that differ entirely from what the administration is putting out.

We're a very young football team. We have a long ways to go before we can compete against the better people on our schedule. We have a young offense, particularly in places that handle the ball.

My heart goes out to all those people,

He's a truly gifted athlete. It takes an awful lot of discipline (to play against Williams), but even discipline is not enough. You end up in one-on-one situations and some of the times our ones won't be as good as their ones. We have to do a good job of helping each other out.

He can take his campaign funds, which he raised more than a million bucks, and now convert that into his legal defense fund.

I thought they might (go for the touchdown), ... but how can you say that was a bad call? It just didn't work out for them this time.

I thought our kids bounced back well. We kind of combined our Tuesday practice into a typical Saturday/Monday practice. We just had to adjust our schedule slightly. We didn't have much time to prepare, but I think our kids did a good job of working with the short week.

I think it was just a combination of the two. We played pretty well on defense, and their youth really showed. Just like our youth showed on offense at times. But I'm very pleased. We haven't been 1-0 in a long time.

Like us, Carencro is playing a lot of sophomores. They have great tradition and they're very talented. We'll have to eliminate our mistakes so we can give them a good game.

I think democracy is under attack in our country. I think it was under attack before September 11th, and now is under rather harsh attack.

We just made a lot of mistakes in the jamboree,

We just had a few plays missed by a hair. We weren't consistent on offense. We need to regroup and see if we can be a little better next week.

There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

There won't be any trick-or-treating with him this year,

Our defense dominated most of the night. We ended up allowing -20 yards rushing and six yards of total offense. The defense did a super job.

It's been a long time that I've been suffering from having no choice but to copy information from a file of HTML format to, say, a document in the DOC format. I had to resort to all those cumbersome operations of copying, editing and so on. This utility has finally eliminated this trouble and saved my time.

If you do not speak up when it matters, when would it matter that you speak? The opposite of courage is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

In the second half our offense got in gear. We played pretty well and mixed it up. We had good balance in the second half. I thought Spencer Hebert did a good job running the ball tonight and Bubba Taylor had a nice long run.

I think our kids are very aware of the situation. We realize how blessed we are to still be together and practicing. In the blink of an eye, kids have had seasons cut short or eliminated. We're practicing with a sense of thankfulness.

His aunt lives right down the street from school and he had been to STM before as a player in our Sunkist basketball tournament, ... He showed up the morning of our Labor Day practice.

If it's dangerous to talk to yourself, it's probably even dicier to listen.

It's an essential fight librarians are making, an age-old fight; yours is a battle for civilization. It's a fight for our country's founding values.

If you don't speak out when it matters, when would it matter to speak out?

Becoming a politician is the only step down I could take from being a journalist.

Good wages are pro business, since they reduce turnover, increase morale, produce better-skilled employees, and improve productivity.

Even a little dog can piss on a big building.

The corporation cannot be ethical, its only responsibility is to make a profit.

The real bias of the media is not to the left or to the right, but to the thin strata of economic elites at the top of our society.

Organic agriculture is more about fairness and respect than it is about parts-per-billion of pesticide residues

If ignorance goes to forty dollars a barrel, I want drilling rights to George Bush's head.

We've got to go to the people with bold ideas and candidates of conviction - we've got to be hotter than high school love.

Banks don't commit crimes. Bankers do. And they won't ever stop if they don't have to pay for their crimes.

The [Democratic] party is a bank. It collects money and gives it to TV stations.

Reagan promised everyone a seven-course dinner. Ours turned out to be a possum and a six-pack.

You have to learn to read between the lies.

Ronald Reagan's idea of a good farm program was Hee Haw.

Some of these rich folks seem to think that everything belongs to them and they'll even get to take it with them when they die. But you know what? You don't ever see a hearse pulling a U Haul.

Populism is at its essence [...] just determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government. [...] One big difference between real populism and what the Tea Party thing is, is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can't say, let's get rid of government. You need to be saying let's take over government.

The water won't clear up until we get the hogs out of the creek.

Founders v. Bush brings the wisdom and eloquence of the Founding Fathers back to the people, while unmasking the fraudulent PR machine that is corrupting their words and stealing our legacy.

The original Greek word "idiotes" referred to people who might have had a high IQ, but were so self-involved that they focused exclusively on their own life and were both ignorant of and uncaring about public concerns and the common good.

America was not built by conformists, but by mutineers.

Politics ought to be fun. It shouldn't be just boring meetings.

The media isn't only asleep; it doesn't want to know this news, that the people are revolting, in the very best sense of the term, revolting against the thieves in high places and reaching out to each other, which is our great strength.

When everybody does better, EVERYBODY does better.

When Rick Perry says I can do for America what I've done for Texas, pay attention. That's no idle threat.

Republicans are so empty-headed, they wouldn't make a good landfill.

America's drug war is so stupid that if you pay close attention to just how stupid it is -- it'll drive you to use drugs.

Like NASCAR race drivers or PGA golfers, why not require each of the [US presidential] candidates to cover their clothing, briefcases and staff with the logo patches of their corporate sponsors?

It may be the rooster that does all the crowing but it's the hen that delivers the goods.

Liberals want to manage the damage with government programs to take care of those who have fallen between the cracks. Populists want to fix the cracks so that people don't fall in the first place.

Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

Some people say we need a third party. I wish we had a second one.