Motivational Molly Ivins Quotes:- Molly Ivins (August 30, 1944 – January 31, 2007) was an American newspaper columnist, author, political commentator, and humorist. Born in California and raised in Texas, Ivins attended Smith College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Inspirational Molly Ivins Quotes
I don’t think I’ve decided much in my life. Don’t you think life just happens?
Molly Ivins
Good thing we’ve still got politics in Texas – finest form of free entertainment ever invented.
Molly Ivins
As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can’t drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against ’em anyway, you don’t belong in office.
Molly Ivins
You can’t ignore politics, no matter how much you’d like to.
Molly Ivins
I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part and discuss it only with consenting adults.
Molly Ivins
The thing is this: You got to have fun while you’re fightin’ for freedom, ’cause you don’t always win.
Molly Ivins
So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.
Molly Ivins
I think provincialism is an endemic characteristic with mankind, I think everybody everywhere is provincial, but it is particularly striking with Texans, and we tend to be very Texcentric.
Molly Ivins
I never saw anything funnier than Texas politics.
Molly Ivins
You look at the large problems that we face – that would be overpopulation, water shortages, global warming, and AIDS, I suppose – all of that needs international cooperation to be solved.
Molly Ivins
Some days, I’d feel better with Punxsutawney Phil in the Oval Office – at least he doesn’t lie about the weather.
Molly Ivins
I spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds.
Molly Ivins
I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet.
Molly Ivins
‘The New York Times’ is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.
Molly Ivins
I have known George W. Bush slightly since we were both in high school, and I studied him closely as governor. He is neither mean nor stupid. What we have here is a man shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined with huge blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo.
Molly Ivins
I’ve said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were ‘German dogs.’ They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.
Molly Ivins
Satire is a weapon, and it can be quite cruel.
Molly Ivins
I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn’t actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.
Molly Ivins
The reason I take Rush Limbaugh seriously is not that he’s offensive or right-wing, but because he is one of the few people addressing a large group of disaffected people in this country. And despite his frequent denials, Limbaugh does indeed have a somewhat cult-like effect on his ditto heads.
Molly Ivins
Rush Limbaugh’s pathetic abuse of logic, his absurd pomposity, his relentless self-promotion, his ridiculous ego – now those, friends, are appropriate targets for satire.
Molly Ivins
Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there’s nothing you can do about being born liberal – fish gotta swim, and hearts gotta bleed.
Molly Ivins
The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it’s not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point. Poor people do not shut down factories… Poor people didn’t decide to use ‘contract employees’ because they cost less and don’t get any benefits.
Molly Ivins
Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?
Molly Ivins
I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel – it’s vulgar.
Molly Ivins
There is more hooey spread about the Second Amendment. It says quite clearly that guns are for those who form part of a well-regulated militia, i.e., the armed forces including the National Guard. The reasons for keeping them away from everyone else get clearer by the day.
Molly Ivins
In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster.
Molly Ivins
Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant – a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers.
Molly Ivins
One nice thing about the benefit of long experience with la Frontera is that we in Texas don’t have to run around getting all hysterical about immigrants. The border is porous. When you want cheap labor, you open it up; when you don’t, you shut it down. It works to our benefit – it always has.
Molly Ivins
The stakes they play for in politics are paper and money. The chips they play with are your life.
Molly Ivins
In all my fantasies, I always assumed I would get married and have six children along the way with the greatest of ease.
Molly Ivins
What I’ve been telling people is that the doctors are gaining on cancer very rapidly. It’s almost become a chronic disease, like diabetes – something you can treat. It doesn’t go away, and you’re not well in the sense of being over it, but you go on and live your life.
Molly Ivins
When I was first diagnosed, I went out, as a book person, and got some books on cancer and looked up my version of the disease. It said that I had about a 5 percent chance of survival. I said, ‘Gosh, well, it’s been a good run.’ What I didn’t realize is that in the two years since those books were published, things had shifted dramatically.
Molly Ivins
I worked through cancer twice. I probably worked through it too much the last time. This time, I found myself saying, ‘Well, I don’t feel well. I think I’ll take the day off.’ I think I did that even a little bit more than I needed to.
Molly Ivins
All my life, I’ve been sort of a professional optimist, full of good cheer about matters political and journalistic. I always thought I’d get older and become an unnaturally cheerful old fart. But it’s not happening.
Molly Ivins
One of the things I said was that I had been in great hopes that I would become a better person as a result of confronting my own mortality, but it actually never happened. I didn’t become a better person.
Molly Ivins
It’s one thing to recognize that the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing like cancer; it’s another thing to come up with useful solutions.
Molly Ivins
Should a girl like me, in whom the milk of human kindness flows copiously for everyone, from protein-shy Hottentots to the glandular obese, actually aim a few swift boots at the prone form of Sen. Phil Gramm? Nah. But it’s tempting.
Molly Ivins
‘Get along, go along’ is not an inspirational philosophy, and only God knows how much moral cowardice it has covered up over the years. Serve your time, collect your chits, and cash ’em in for your home state? No, I’d say we could ask for more than that from our senators.
Molly Ivins
Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.
Molly Ivins
Raise hell – big time. I want y’all to get out there and raise hell about damned near everything. My word, there’s a world out there that needs fixing. Get out there and get after it.
Molly Ivins
If Bush does make it to the White House, he and Laura should have Ken Starr over for dinner.
Molly Ivins
All anyone needs to enjoy the state legislature is a strong stomach and a complete insensitivity to the needs of the people. As long as you don’t think about what that peculiar body should be doing and what it actually is doing to the quality of life in Texas, then it’s all marvelous fun.
Molly Ivins
As I occasionally survey the pack of sycophantic Shih Tzus in the Washington press corps, wriggling on their bellies to kiss the feet of those in power, I feel plumb discouraged about the future of journalism.
Molly Ivins
The danger of the blogosphere is reading only those you agree with. While there are right-wing blogs that are entertaining freak shows, it’s hard to find substantial journalism there.
Molly Ivins
If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They’d tell you stuff like, ‘Don’t drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it’s dirty.’ In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids’ paws, and the colored fountain was always clean.
Molly Ivins
I want to point out, there are a lot of politicians who enjoy the political end of politics, but they’re not interested in governance. And then, there are some that are really interested in governance and are just terrible at politics.
Molly Ivins
Don’t get me started about the media double standard.
Molly Ivins
The Internet goes doot-doot-doot – it goes sideways. There’s nothing hierarchical about it. And the best thing about it is also the worst thing about it, which is there are no gatekeepers on the Internet. Consequently, there’s a whole lot of bad information on the Internet. But I think that sorts itself out over time.
Molly Ivins
The Federal Reserve system obviously doesn’t work anymore – they keep lowering the federal discount rate, and all that happens is that the banks are making a fortune, and the old folks’ CDs are getting chewed up.
Molly Ivins
On a personal note: I have contracted an outstanding case of breast cancer, from which I intend to recover. I don’t need get-well cards, but I would like the beloved women readers to do something for me: Go. Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Done.
Molly Ivins
Don’t get me started about the media double standard.
Molly Ivins
There was really quite a remarkable level of sexism in newspapers when I started.
Molly Ivins
I left the ‘Trib’ in 1970 with the feeling that I would never have a career in establishment media of any kind.
Molly Ivins
Even after four years in office, George W. Bush’s record on women doesn’t leap out at you. It’s composed almost entirely of little things, small enough to fly well under the media’s radar screen, so few of us have any sense of their cumulative impact.
Molly Ivins
Anyone who watched George W. and Karl Rove while the former was governor of Texas will recognize a familiar pattern. Like much of Bush’s social policy – from faith-based social services to railing against gay marriage – women’s issues are one of the bones they’ve decided they can throw to the Christian right.
Molly Ivins
Right before the Bush inauguration, many women were greatly reassured when Laura said of Roe v. Wade on the ‘Today’ show, ‘No, I don’t think it should be overturned.’ Three days later, her husband reimposed the ‘global gag rule’ on groups abroad that receive U.S. funding for family planning.
Molly Ivins
In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn’t get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow – and who is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people.
Molly Ivins
To mistake Midland for the volk heartland is the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut, in Levittown.
Molly Ivins
People in Midland are real nice folks: I can’t prove that with statistics, but I know West Texas, and it’s just a fact.
Molly Ivins
We should all laugh more at our elected officials – it’s good for us and good for them.
Molly Ivins
Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.
Molly Ivins
One thing I have learned from Johnny Faulk, Texas, and life, is that since you don’t always win, you got to learn to enjoy just fightin’ the good fight.
Molly Ivins
I think one can easily make a case for taking out Saddam Hussein. In fact, one could probably be made on humanitarian grounds alone. But just as there’s a downside risk to doing nothing about this man, there is a very serious downside risk to invading the country.
Molly Ivins
New York is just as provincial as anyone else.
Molly Ivins
I intensely covered Bush when he was Governor of Texas.
Molly Ivins
I really think the single most important thing to remember about trying to fix the schools is that there is no such thing as an instant result.
Molly Ivins
I saw a shrink because I thought I suffered from a fear of success.
Molly Ivins
One of the more up-making habits of media mavens is presuming to speak for the American people, as in ‘The American people won’t stand for this!’
Molly Ivins
Jimmy Carter was unquestionably the most moral president of my lifetime, but he wasn’t much of a president.
Molly Ivins
The greatest moral leader of my lifetime was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose private life does not bear close examination.
Molly Ivins
One of the few things I like about Bill Clinton is that he has very good manners. If his momma were still alive, I would congratulate her.
Molly Ivins
If Democrats in Washington haven’t got enough sense to own the issue of political reform, I give up on them entirely.
Molly Ivins
For years, I have been trying to persuade people that George W. Bush, although no Einstein, is not stupid.
Molly Ivins
It’s a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.
Molly Ivins
We need to reform the political system, or we’ll lose the democracy. I don’t think it’s that hard. It doesn’t take rocket science. We’ve done it before successfully at the presidential level and tried it several places at the state level.
Molly Ivins
People like to help. They like to be able to do something for you. Let them.
Molly Ivins
Losing a part of a breast or all of one or both has, obviously, serious psychological consequences.
Molly Ivins
One seldom expects the country’s president to adequately note the passing of a rocker, but Jimmy Carter’s assessment of Elvis Presley’s appeal – ‘energy, rebelliousness and good humor’ – is remarkably close to the mark.
Molly Ivins
There is never anyone quite so wonderful as the people who were seniors when you were a freshman.
Molly Ivins
In Congress, there are some who are unashamed to aspire to eloquence, even to scholarship, but the only state legislator I ever knew who would not join in the mispronunciation of a word for the sake of camaraderie with her fellows was former State Senator and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
Molly Ivins
I wouldn’t say that dittoheads, as a group, lack the ability to reason. It’s just that whenever I run across one, he seems to be at a low ebb in reasoning skills.
Molly Ivins
