Jim Hightower Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Most people have a sense that things have gone terribly wrong. It's not just some giveaways to the rich and the rigging of regulatory rules. It's something fundamental. The very idea of America is being stolen, and people are sensing that with a tremor within their hearts. They are taking away this core notion of the common good, this idea that we are all in it together. They are diverting America from our historic striving towards egalitarianism, which is why America exists. It's the thing that makes us unique in history. That's what people are sensing. We are going down the wrong path.

America was not built by conformists, but by mutineers.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.'

Even a little dog can piss on a big building.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

When everybody does better, EVERYBODY does better.

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.

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 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.

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

You have to learn to read between the lies.