Public Policy Quotes

1. "Everything that Bush touches turns to manure in public policy."
Author: Alec Baldwin

2. "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."
Author: Alexander Fraser Tytler

3. "A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy..."
Author: Alexander Fraser Tytler

4. "We are doing everything we can to protect the food supply. And I can tell you that we're making decisions based upon sound science and good public policy, given the circumstances that we are now in."
Author: Ann Veneman

5. "Public enthusiasm for new advances is a key ingredient in influencing policy-makers to stimulate follow-up work with suitable funding, and it can be achieved far faster now that interested non-specialists can explore new research autonomously and can also be appealed to directly by scientists."
Author: Aubrey De Grey

6. "When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside-at a city charity affair which all had to attend-and reproached him for what they called hid debasement of the public taste."It is not my function" said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public, I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to belive"."
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "I believe honor thy mother and father is not just a good commandment to live by, it is good public policy to govern by. That is why I feel so strongly about Medicare."
Author: Barbara Mikulski

8. "Jackie O was so capable in so many ways. Hillary tried to redefine the role when she got into public policy, and Michelle Obama is able to move smoothly between form and function, style and substance."
Author: Bellamy Young

9. "I think unionization is good public policy. I think when families secure their economic future, that's good for everyone."
Author: Bill De Blasio

10. "Public policy in the twentieth century was about protecting and expanding the social compact, based on recognition that effective government at the federal level provides rules and services and safety measures that contribute to a better society."
Author: Carl Bernstein

11. "Conscious of our many problems, I seek today to lay a foundation to our public policy. My fundamental purpose is to devote my term of office to raising the standard of public service in New Jersey."
Author: Charles Edison

12. "As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history."
Author: Christina Romer

13. "I always keep a firewall between my own travails and my perception of public-policy issues; otherwise I would retain no credibility as a commentator."
Author: Conrad Black

14. "Tolerance obviously requires a non-contentious manner of relating toward one another's differences. But tolerance does not require abandoning one's standards or one's opinions on political or public policy choices. Tolerance is a way of reacting to diversity, not a command to insulate it from examination."
Author: Dallin H. Oaks

15. "The building of publicly funded stadiums has become a substitue for anything resembling an urban policy."
Author: Dave Zirin

16. "Many of these policies were proposed by wonks who are comfortable only with traits and correlations that can be measured and quantified. They were passed through legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about the deep wellsprings of human action as they are of speaking in ancient Aramaic. They were executed by officials that have only the most superficial grasp of what is immovable and bent about human beings. So of course they failed. And they will continue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public policy, unless the enchanted story is told along with the prosaic one."
Author: David Brooks

17. "The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side."
Author: Eric J. Hobsbawm

18. "There is much that public policy can do to support American entrepreneurs. Health insurance reform will make it easier for entrepreneurs to take a chance on a new business without putting their family's health at risk. Tort reform will make it easier to take prudent risks on new products in a number of sectors."
Author: Eric Ries

19. "I'm pleased to offer analysis of public policy and politics to the millions of Americans who get their news from Fox."
Author: Evan Bayh

20. "The only realistic view is that a human life arises gradually, which is not much help in making personal decisions or devising public policy."
Author: George C. Williams

21. "I retired from public Business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice."
Author: George Mason

22. "Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on election day. The mere fact of its being on the ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago."
Author: George Soros

23. "In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end."
Author: Gerald R. Ford

24. "I do believe that, under the law, under the Constitution of the United States, and under our public policy, that women deserve and should have a right to enjoy equal employment opportunity."
Author: Gloria Allred

25. "Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers."
Author: James Hansen

26. "A stronger focus on quality public policymaking and less distraction of personalities would be a sufficient and important contribution I can make."
Author: Jay Weatherill

27. "And there was a deeper, less visible effect of the Truman loyalty program. Seeing its consequences for certain individuals and fearing its intrusion on their own lives, many in the government sought protection by strongly asserting their anti-Communism. In the public action that ensued, policy was based not on reality but, instinctively or deliberately, on personal caution...Those who urged a militant and sometimes military anti-Communism were considered sound, trustworthy and personally safe; those who questioned such a course were politically unsafe, possible even slightly disloyal."
Author: John Kenneth Galbraith

28. "The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy."
Author: Joseph Stiglitz

29. "When public policy is directed toward urban spaces, it is directed toward people who sit at the margins."
Author: Julianne Malveaux

30. "I think the understanding of the role of markets has really helped advance the values of entrepreneurship. It's helped shape public policy discussions in a whole variety of ways."
Author: Lars Peter Hansen

31. "Judicial activists are nothing short of radicals in robes--contemptuous of the rule of law, subverting the Constitution at will, and using their public trust to impose their policy preferences on society. In fact, no radical political movement has been more effective in undermining our system of government than the judiciary. And with each Supreme Court term, we hold our collective breath hoping the justices will do no further damage, knowing full well they will disappoint. Such is the nature of judicial tyranny."
Author: Mark R. Levin

32. "And if we make the process political, if we start to make it personal, we're actually going to frustrate good public policy, in terms of managing this money."
Author: Michael Chertoff

33. "In Barack Obama, Democrats have put forth a man of strong religious faith who is comfortable connecting his spiritual life to his public role as a policymaker."
Author: Mike McCurry

34. "I would advocate that chocolate be covered by health insurance, but that is admittedly a very French public policy perspective."
Author: Mireille Guiliano

35. "It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying."
Author: Nicholas A. Christakis

36. "The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another."
Author: Noam Chomsky

37. "I believe, unlike people that are totally free-market, laissez-faire fundamentalists, that there is an important role that the government can play - one, in providing public goods, whether it's education, health care, or other things, and two, supervising countercyclical policy - stimulus, whether it's monetary, fiscal, or otherwise."
Author: Nouriel Roubini

38. "Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture."
Author: Orrin Hatch

39. "Avoid any specific discussion of public policy at public meetings."
Author: Quintus Tullius Cicero

40. "American public policy is run on a myth."
Author: Richard Lamm

41. "Christians can disagree about public policy in good faith, and a libertarian and a social democrat can both claim to be living out the gospel. But the Christian libertarian has a particular obligation to recognize those places where libertarianism's emphasis on freedom can shade into an un-Christian worship of the individual. Likewise the Christian liberal: even as he supports government interventions to assist the poor and dispossessed, he should be constantly on guard against the tendency to deify Leviathan and wary of the ways that government power can easily be turned to inhuman and immoral ends.In the contemporary United States, a host of factors—from the salience of issues like abortion to the anti-Christian biases of our largely left-wing intelligentsia—ensure that many orthodox Christians feel more comfortable affiliating with the Republican Party than with the Democrats. But this comfort should not blind Christians to the GOP's flaws."
Author: Ross Douthat

42. "In the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and its a policy where they do not encourage, in fact, discourage, critical thinking and the creation of ideas and public education."
Author: Russell Means

43. "Because we spoke so loudly, opponents of reproductive health access demonized and smeared me and others on the public airwaves. These smears are obvious attempts to distract from meaningful policy discussions and to silence women's voices regarding their own health care."
Author: Sandra Fluke

44. "Universality has been severely reduced: it is virtually dead as a concept in most areas of public policy."
Author: Stephen Harper

45. "The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review."
Author: Terence McKenna

46. "Second, the President's popularity has not translated into increased support for the Republican party or for the policies and approaches on domestic policy championed by the President."
Author: Thomas E. Mann

47. "Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance."
Author: Thomas E. Mann

48. "I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United States Senate and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion."
Author: Tim O'Brien

49. "The major economic policy challenges facing the nation today - pick your favorites among the usual suspects of low public and household savings, concerns about educational quality and achievement, high and rising income inequality, the large imbalances between our social insurance commitments and resources - are not about monetary policy."
Author: Timothy Geithner

50. "The platform we had in Dallas, the 1984 Republican platform, all the ideas we supported there - from tax policy, to foreign policy; from individual rights, to neighborhood security - are things that Jefferson Davis and his people believed in."
Author: Trent Lott

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