Quotes About Legislators

Let us tell our legislators in advance, that this is a right, restraints on which, we will not, cannot bear; and that every attempt to restrain it is a palpable wrong on God and man.

In Maine, we are fortunate to have a Clean Elections system that allows legislators to turn down corporate special interest money. At the national level, Congress should follow Maine's example by empowering the voices of small donors.

When I first got asked to run for the state Senate, I was asked by a number of legislators I had worked with, and I thanked them and declined.

If you force legislators to balance, at the end of the day, if it has to be balanced, then they step up and they become legislators and can find out where to cut.

Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as sinkhole when opposing funding for Chicago's children. We can't keep throwing money, said Governor Thompson in 1988, into a black hole. The Chicago Tribune notes that, when this phrase is used, people hasten to explain that it is not intended as a slur against the race of many of Chicago's children. But race, says the Tribune, never is far from the surface...

What do I mean by commitment? I'll flash back to 1821: Shelley's claim, in "The Defence of Poetry", that "poets are the unacknowledged legislaters of the world". Piously overquoted, mostly out of context, it's taken to suggest that simply by virtue of compossing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power - in a vaue, unthreatening way. (...) He did NOT say, "Poets are the unacknowledged interior decorators of the world".

We have to continue to raise awareness as the Voting Rights Caucus... make sure people call into their state legislators. Let us know that they've decided they weren't going to vote because they heard it was a hassle.

If legislators come to believe that police power is an ever-present constitutional trump card they can play whenever it suits them, overreaching is inexorable.

Los legisladores deberían centrarse siempre en cualquier mercado con rentas excesivas, pues son un indicador de que la economía podría funcionar más eficientemente: en realidad, la explotación inherente a estas termina debilitando la economía. Una batalla exitosa contra la búsqueda de renta redunda en redirigir los recursos hacia la creación de riqueza.

it was easy to forget that Washington was just another glum city of government, like Albany or Sacramento, legislators and lobbyists and bureaucrats and their clerks working and reworking the sodden language of government in order to distribute the spoils.

throughout history the community of readers has been prey to sinister forces - to pedants and priests, legislators and lunatics, deities and demagogues. You have paid for your passion in humiliation, mutilation, and sometimes even - as when Henry VIII burned Bible translator William Tyndale as a heretic - immolation. I salute you all, as do my fellow books.

Observing this widespread failure to rectify conditions, Roosevelt recalled, "I became more set than ever in my distrust of those men, whether business men or lawyers, judges, legislators, or executive officers, who seek to make of the Constitution a fetish for the prevention of the work of social reform.

if the M.C.C. were to agree, in a thoughtless moment, that the ball must be so hit by the batsman that it should never come down to earth again, cricket would become an impossibility. A vivid sense of reality usually restrains sports committees from promulgating laws of this kind; other legislators occasionally lack this salutary realism.

I'm wary when legislators say the solution to school shootings is mental health care, because it suggests that people who are mentally ill are violent, and that's just not true.

Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.

was glaringly obvious that a new currency at Facebook scale would be a systemic risk — it would be big enough to break everything. Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately — they knew this kind of foolishness, and they knew that these Bitcoin venture capital bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.

Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid. But this didn't just happen. It is the result of intentional policy choices. Since the 1980s, legislators have led the way in systematically defunding the post office and encouraging private alternatives as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn't really work.

Just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political corruption by making the bribery of legislators effectively legal (it was redefined as "lobbying")

It is unthinkable to allow complete strangers, whether individually or collectively as state legislators or others in government, to make such personal decisions for someone else.

Legislators invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.

With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law, and every time they make a law it's a joke.

At a time when special interest money is being showered on legislators in Washington, grassroots donors offer members of Congress a refreshing independence. The $25 and $50 donor is not looking for special favors. He or she is simply expecting their Congressman to go do the right thing.

It is fascinating to watch legislators turn away from their usual corporate grips when they hear the growing thunder of the people.

In reality, everybody in Congress is a stand-in for some kind of lobbyist. In many cases it's difficult to tell whether it's the companies that are lobbying the legislators or whether it's the other way around.