Ted Rall Quotes

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

Most people don't know how to tell stories.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.