Ted Rall Quotes

Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.

Most people don't know how to tell stories.

The experts who managed the original Marshall Plan say Afghanistan needs a commitment of at least $5 to $10 billion over 5 to 10 years, coupled with occupation forces of 250,000 Allied soldiers to keep the peace throughout the country.

Trying to rebuild Afghanistan on the cheap has left the country in the hands of warlords and an impotent Northern Alliance puppet regime that runs Kabul and nothing else.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel.

I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel.

When you have birds you stare at them a lot and their eyes are recessed on their head. When they look at something they tilt their head in a quizzical expression.

The first step to stringing the boss up from a lamppost is saying the boss is a moron.

Close friends love you for who you are; not what they want you to be.

When you do a cartoon based on news headlines, you do it based on incomplete information.

Orrin Hatch was the keynote speaker at the last meeting of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He sought me out because he was a fan. I was thinking he had confused me with someone else.

Even though I'm a leftist. I think the left eats its own.

On the ground, Pakistan is the most virulently anti-American state on the planet.

There was an honorable tradition of using anonymous sources that was ruined by Jayson Blair.

The best thing about being a cartoonist is to walk into a bar or someone's apartment and they don't know you, but they've taped one of your pieces up.

I'm a better editorial cartoonist by default because so many editorial cartoonists out there are so awful.

Over time, however, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared.

Conservative humor is frankly harder than liberal humor. You get points for just being liberal. You can get more points if you make fun of your own side sometimes.

Life is incredibly short, yet we're always told that change takes time. For a race of mortals, dicking around just isn't acceptable.

Money stress is what used to remind me of my Dad most.

I never consciously do any work directly influenced from any movie, unless I'm doing a parody.

Up until 1995, I still had a day job that I hated. I was still personally involved in things in the 90s.

For an ordinary citizen, what is the common interaction you have with a police officer? When they pull you over for speeding, or when they write you a ticket for parking. The rest of the time is patrolling minority neighborhoods like an occupying army. It's suppression of blacks, and it's revenue enhancement. Surveillance is a Band-Aid. That's like saying, "Let's surveil the SS." No! Let's get rid of the SS!

That's what comics journalism does better than anything else: you can get a feeling of what it was like. Like Scott McCloud says, especially with a simple drawing style, you can project yourself into the image, and imagine yourself having those experiences.

Saddam Hussein, influenced by fascism, ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of people, fought two disastrous wars, turned his nation into an international pariah and ruined his country’s economy. In other words, his record is identical to George W. Bush’s.

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

What people don't seem to ever understand is that any infrastructure that exists under your regime, in your current government, will be appropriated and inherited by the next regime. I mean, the KGB came out of the NKVD which came out of the Tsarist version of the same thing. And now, the FSB operates out of the old KGB building in Moscow. The infrastructure remains exactly the same. There's a little bit of reshuffling of personnel, and that's it. The way to make sure that there's no FSB today would have been for the Tsar to not have built an infrastructure for it in the 1800s.

It's a perfectly valid position to not like Shakespeare.

Bernie Sanders is an impressive guy. His authenticity and his credibility stem precisely from the fact that he has been marginalized from the mainstream political process for decades. He's been in the US Senate, yeah, he has had a life in politics for thirty years, but he's never really been able to get anything done. He's the only socialist in the US Congress. He's not a Democrat or a Republican, but he's always been saying the same things about income inequality, in particular.

I was reading through all these NSA programs that Snowden has revealed, and one of the ones that fascinated me was that smart TVs can be used to look at you in your room. That is totally like the telescreen from 1984. It's not sort of like it, it's not a lot like it, it is it. And the ability of the NSA to turn on your cell phone, even if it's powered down, and listen to you in your home - that's insane to me. People had been warning that 1984 was just around the corner. Well, it has arrived, and Snowden has proven that.

I think jazz is good, but I don't enjoy it. It's not for me.

Do our government's poorly paid contract killers deserve our 'support' for blindly following orders?

The word 'hero' has been bandied about a lot to refer to anyone killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. But anyone who voluntarily goes to Afghanistan or Iraq [as a soldier] is fighting for an evil cause under an evil commander in chief.

Anyone should be able to read comics.

Here in the US, we've built this insane infrastructure of oppression. When it's not run by a Barack Obama - who, by the way, I don't think is a perfect president - but by someone who is off-kilter, like a Carly Fiorina, that could be dangerous.

Imagine foreign troops sitting idly, laughing as hooligans trashed the Smithsonian, stole the gold from Fort Knox and burned down the Department of the Interior. That was us in Iraq.

I would like to fire every cop in America and start from scratch. We don't need as many of them, and the whole model of policing is completely off the rails. For the most part, the police are engaged in very little protection of the public. That's probably 5 percent of what they do. The rest of it is writing tickets.

Anyway, I tried liking Jimmy Corrigan but I couldn't.

At this point, American workers are pretty respectful of the bosses they loathe.

Americans are not terribly intelligent people. They need to read important things several times.

Comics are too big. You can't say any kind or genre of comics is better than another. You can say so subjectively. But to say it like it's objective is wrong. It's wrong morally, because it cuts out stuff that's good.