Thom Hartmann > Quotes

“Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it”
― Thom Hartmann

“Many people today think that the Tea Act—which led to the Boston Tea Party—was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by the American colonists. That's where the whole "Taxation Without Representation" meme came from.

Instead, the purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade and to exempt the company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea that it was unable to sell and holding in inventory.

In other words, the Tea Act was the largest corporate tax break in the history of the world.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“Master Stanley used to tell me that what I was doing was nowhere near as important as the place within myself from where I was doing it. For example, a person could be teaching others out of a selfless motive, or out of a desire for power or glory: the former had a positive impact on the world, whereas the latter had a negative impact, even though the same identical teaching may have been imparted. “It’s the spirit that’s important,” he would say. “It’s even more important than the act. Going to work in a gas station and providing for your family out of love is more important than creating a mighty religious work out of a desire for glory or power.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Prophet's Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

“And so we see people who are spiritually disconnected, living in boxes and driving in boxes, perhaps once a year going "out to nature" to get a small touch of what was once the daily experience of humans. These people seek escape. They sit in urban and suburban homes and feel miserable, not knowing why, experiencing anxiety and fear and pain that cannot be softened by drugs or TV or therapy because they are afflicted with a sickness of the soul, not of the mind.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late

“The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“Both Jefferson and Adams were wary of priests in all forms, as they both knew theocracies are enemies of democracy. Jefferson pointed out that the Indians shared their wariness:”
― Thom Hartmann, What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy

“It’s ironic that the Tea Party populists, most of whom believe that they are furthering the American ideal of “rugged individualism,” are supporting mega-corporate-friendly policies like Reaganomics and Clintonomics and are making it very difficult for individuals to be anything other than drones in a giant corporate-run economic machine. And, on the flipside, those countries that call themselves “democratic socialist” in their organization—Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden—actually provide a deep and fertile soil into which entrepreneurs may plant new businesses.”
― Thom Hartmann, Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child

“June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled “Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Bankers’ ” noted, “The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths.”107”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“the Occupy Movement flared up and began setting up tents in public parks all around the nation, from New York City to Chicago to Seattle. But it actually happened exactly eighty years earlier, when the nation was drowning in President Hoover’s Great Depression, and not President Bush’s Great Recession. These settlements weren’t called “occupations” at the time, they were called “Hoovervilles.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“the Constitution was designed not to give us rights but to prevent government from taking our rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“Humans are born with human rights. Those human rights are inherent—”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“There is more carbon in the atmosphere trapping heat and moisture than ever before in the 165,000 years of human history.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“the rise to the presidency of serial rapist, wannabe fascist, and crooked businessman Donald Trump.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy

“An important book for understanding the history of our economic boom & bust cycles. It's an eye-opening account of how we are repeating the mistakes of the 1760's, 1850's, and 1920's. The author is a brilliant writer and is so good at explaining even the most complex subjects in a compelling & easy to understand way. The next crash will be painful but it's important to understand what is being done to us, and how we can learn from history and take action.”
― Thom Hartmann

“nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn’t even include in the Constitution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. [It] says what the states can’t do to you. [It] says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following: • We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs. • We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services. . . . • We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . . • We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes. • We support the eventual repeal of all taxation. • As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately. • We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . . • Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . . • We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . . • We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system. . . . • We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . . • We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44 The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote—and How To Get It Back

“But Hamilton lost the day, Jefferson won, and we have a Bill of Rights built into our Constitution that, as Hamilton feared, has increasingly been used to limit, rather than expand, the range of human rights American citizens can claim. And because it’s in our Constitution, the only way other than a Supreme Court decision to make explicit “new” rights (such as a right to health care) is through the process of amending that document.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“So we now know the formula for extinction. Something happens to increase global temperatures five to six degrees, which triggers a melting of the frozen carbon and methane oceanic reserves that then leads to further global warming devastating life on Earth. Thus, the pressing question for us today is this: Can seven billion people on the planet burning fossil fuels imitate the sort of carbon greenhouse gas release caused by the Permian lava flows, or the K/T mass extinction impact or whatever warming caused the PETM? The answer is yes.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction

“As [President Thomas] Jefferson realized, with no government interference by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there could be no broad middle class—maybe a sliver of small businesses and artisans, but the vast majority of us would be the working poor under the yolk [sic] of elites.

The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy.

After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich....

As Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter...a totally "free" market, where corporations reign supreme just like the oppressive governments of old, could transform America 'until the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“With the help of prominent media outlets, the Royalists, now a political minority, would engage in a scorched-earth strategy to defeat a coming Progressive Revolution, even if it meant crashing the United States as we know it. If they were going down, then the rest of the nation was going down with them.

Which is exactly what happened.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“As a reward, Columbus frequently presented his men with local women to rape. As he exported enslaved Taino to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of his business. Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: “A hundred castellanoes [a Spanish coin] are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten [years old] are now in demand.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment: How to Talk about Race, Religion, Politics, and Other Polarizing Topics

“Instead of defining a few rights, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84, “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn’t say that corporations are people. The U.S. Constitution wasn’t written with that idea; corporations aren’t mentioned anywhere in the document or its Amendments. For America’s first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said, “No, corporations do not have the same rights as humans.” In fact, the Founders were quite clear (as you can see from Hamilton’s debate earlier) that only humans inherently have rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“We no longer have a government of, by, and for the people—representative democracy. We have government by plutocracy—the rule of the rich for the rich by the rich,” Moyers”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“While the English law that the colonies operated under specified that the bond status of a father determined the status of his child, as more and more Virginia farm, factory, and plantation owners fathered “mulatto” children by raping enslaved African women, in 1662 Virginia changed the law to specify the mother’s status as defining that of her child.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy

“Today, giant corporatism—the commercialism of just about everything at the expense of our civilization’s civic, spiritual, health, and safety values, and other conditions needed for the well-being of future generations confronting poverty, addressing planetary climate crises, and averting nuclear war—is crushing our democracy. It is corrupting our elections and, astonishingly enough, controlling the vast commons—public lands; public airwaves; vast pension and mutual funds; and industry-creating, government-funded research and development—owned by the people.”
― Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Thom Hartmann, ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer’s World