Quotes About Policy

The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time.

The brutal campaign of mass sterilisation, forced abortion and infanticide was exacerbated by the voluntary murder of baby girls on a genocidal scale as parents tried to ensure that their one legal child was a boy. Fertility fell, but not much faster than it would have done if a policy of economic development, public health and education had been adopted instead. What

The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. Malthus's

the state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward. That

The more a country adopted central planning, the better its education system did, but the worse its economic performance – not least because, like Egypt, it churned out many would-be bureaucrats trained to do the central planning.

Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon.

If climate change proves to be mild but cutting carbon causes real pain, we may find we have stopped a nose bleed by putting a tourniquet round our neck.

Disease and death directly attributable to massive health care policy failure was and remains a far more real danger to American lives than any military enemy.

Why don't you wish to take any credit for it, James? That's out of character and out of the policy at which you're such an expert. In an age when men exist, not by right, but by favor, one does not reject a grateful person, one tries to trap into gratitude as many people as possible. Don't you want to have me as one of your men under obligation?

Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?

A nation that can't control its energy sources can't control its future.

But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.

The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight - that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie - contained a good deal of truth.

At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

Then again, a president wasn't a lawyer or an accountant or a pilot, hired to carry out some narrow, specialized task. Mobilizing public opinion, shaping working coalitions - that was the job. Whether I liked it or not, people were moved by emotion, not facts. To elicit the best rather than the worst of those emotions, to buttress those better angels of our nature with reason and sound policy, to perform while still speaking the truth - that was the bar I needed to clear.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works

I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manfuacturer's lobby.

But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness—all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power.

Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time

knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

I signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It was a significant triumph: the most sweeping change to the rules governing America's financial sector since the New Deal.

And as the struggle to pass healthcare legislation was also teaching me, the mere fact that Republicans had once supported a policy idea championed by one of their own did not mean they'd support THE SAME EXACT IDEA coming from a Democratic president.

well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government