Ted Rall Quotes

“Hail, Columbia! Home of the six inch cockroach and the stadium-sized lecture hall. A reservation for rich white people guarded by poor brown people in a sea of urban decay. Where nobody on the faculty has ever spent ten minutes in the freshman dorm, but everybody talks about humanism and compassion. They teach you that military people are scum, trash, the lowest of the low
and then they assign Homer's ILIAD just to develop your sense of irony. Where else can you see three suicides a month dismissed as slightly above average, but better than Smith or Brown?”

— Ted Rall

I suppose I could have been nicer when I was at Columbia. I could have been polite, respectful, turned in my papers on time. Funny thing is, I knew a guy like that. English major. Loved to read. Never got in any trouble, just hung out in Butler Library reading poetry and English history. Ran into him the other day. Guy has three master's degrees, taught high school, even did a few years in the Marines. Know what he does today?
He makes $9.75 an hour as a librarian.
I was a jerk when I went to Columbia. But I was never a sucker.

— Ted Rall

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.

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

“But now that I'm cartooning full-time, I'm more of an observer. I'm talking to people who are experiencing these things. But it's not like being in the trenches.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

I think we're the first generation to successfully integrate American society.

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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.

— Ted Rall

“Anyone should be able to read comics.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

“I think Dilbert is actually a radical strip.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

“I'm a better polemicist in prose.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

“Most people don't know how to tell stories.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall

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.

— Ted Rall

“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.”

— Ted Rall

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

— Ted Rall