Top 74 Jerry Brown Quotes
#1. Even when you sign a treaty like I think [Richard] Nixon did, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, George W. Bush reneged on it. He got out of. So any treaty can be withdrawn from.
Jerry Brown
#2. We need to become more unreasonable but in an intelligent way.
Jerry Brown
#3. California is the third largest oil producer. More importantly, California burns more oil, consumes more oil than any state or collection of states in America.
Jerry Brown
#4. The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs.
Jerry Brown
#5. I like computers. I like the Internet. It's a tool that can be used. But don't be misled into thinking that these technologies are anything other than aspects of a degenerate economic system.
Jerry Brown
#6. We are in a degenerate state of self-government. In fact, even to use the words self-government, is not only an exaggeration, it's a lie. It's a big lie!
Jerry Brown
#7. The war on drugs is really no war at all - it's a business!
Jerry Brown
#8. Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.
Jerry Brown
#9. Life simply is. It follows its course. Give yourself to the moment. Let life reveal itself to you.
Jerry Brown
#10. So we are being systematically trained to fear this false 'rising crime' tide. This is all part of a system to lock up more people, and impose more control and surveillance.
Jerry Brown
#11. Inaction may be the biggest form of action.
Jerry Brown
#12. Basically, if you have above-average intelligence, you have common sense and you can speak in front of a camera and to a crowd, you can govern the state.
Jerry Brown
#13. You've got the oil companies fighting Pope Francis. Fighting the scientists of the world. Fighting the governor of California. They are engaged in literally a life-and-death struggle, and I have no doubt who is going to be the victor.
Jerry Brown
#14. Not to mention the CIA which should be, I think, dissolved, it's of no use - a great source of mischief - I don't see any point to the FBI ...
Jerry Brown
#15. Several unions have agreed to larger employee contributions for their members. Taxpayers are living with cuts and making sacrifices to deal with the reality of California's budget crisis, state workers are going to have to do the same.
Jerry Brown
#16. The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals, Nazi-style.
Jerry Brown
#17. When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.
Jerry Brown
#18. Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness.
Jerry Brown
#19. The way people are treated in them [prisons] is very similar to gulags.
Jerry Brown
#20. This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system.
Jerry Brown
#21. Republican attacks are without basis, but when the Democrats attack me they're usually right.
Jerry Brown
#22. Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.
Jerry Brown
#23. Look at the whole criminal correction game, which is a big piece of our economy. It's just an invention. Crime is being invented to put people to work.
Jerry Brown
#24. The shuttle tomorrow is truly like laying the last spike on the transcontinental railroad, only much more so. And whether or not we're going to see in in the next 10 or 20 years, there are people alive today who will see manufacturing in space from moon materials or from asteroids.
Jerry Brown
#25. Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.
Jerry Brown
#26. Pension reform can be hard to talk about. In the long run, reform now means fewer demands for layoffs and less draconian measures in the future. It's in the best interest of all Californians to fix this system now.
Jerry Brown
#27. Here the system is creating an industry around the drug issue when it does nothing to stop the corrupt military that moves the drugs, and the big banks that are all in cahoots with the President and the big shots in the Congress.
Jerry Brown
#28. It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.
Jerry Brown
#29. Everyone's heard about the military-industrial complex, but they know very little about the medical-industrial complex ... (in) a medical arms race ...
Jerry Brown
#30. We're being ripped off and screwed by a bunch of liars, thieves, crooks, and criminals, and they're not the folks below. Don't look in the streets, look in the corporate suites.
Jerry Brown
#32. The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs. This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.
Jerry Brown
#33. Multinational corporations do control. They control the politicians. They control the media. They control the pattern of consumption, entertainment, thinking. They're destroying the planet and laying the foundation for violent outbursts and racial division.
Jerry Brown
#34. We have to deal with where we are. We have to create cooperatives, we have to create intentional communities, we have to work for local cooperation where we are.
Jerry Brown
#35. Nuclear power will be the Vietnam issue of the 1980s.
Jerry Brown
#36. Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.
Jerry Brown
#37. In some cases, managers and employees have secured pensions beyond their original base salary. It is wrong, the people doing it know it's wrong, and we have to put an end to it.
Jerry Brown
#38. We have to be realistic about what the state can afford, and put an end to abuses of the system that cost millions.
Jerry Brown
#39. Taking significant amounts of carbon out of our economy without harming its vibrancy is exactly the sort of challenge at which California excels.
Jerry Brown
#40. At least when I was govenor, cocaine was expensive.
Jerry Brown
#41. The whole Jeffersonian ideal was that people are temporarily in government. Government is not the basic reality. People are. The private sector. And government is just a limited power to make things go better.
Jerry Brown
#42. Organic farming is about buying out of a corrupt, illegal and dishonest system.
Jerry Brown
#43. The government is becoming the family of last resort.
Jerry Brown
#44. The CIA was revealed to be spying in France, not for military purposes, but for corporate purposes. So this $30 billion spook agency is now at the disposal of these oligarchic corporate structures run by the 1%.
Jerry Brown
#45. I'd shrink government in a minute, if I could shrink GM, Bank of America, and all these immoral corporations that operate by an undemocratic code, with no soul and no conscience.
Jerry Brown
#46. As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.
Jerry Brown
#47. Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Jerry Brown
#48. I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.
Jerry Brown
#49. I've been in office and I've been out of office. And if I were to choose, I'd rather be in office.
Jerry Brown
#50. Sometimes the highest form of action is inaction.
Jerry Brown
#51. The great problem with government is that it never goes bankrupt.
Jerry Brown
#52. I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.
Jerry Brown
#53. The sovereignty of America has just been eroded in plain daylight by Clinton and the Congress, who take an oath to the Constitution. Those criminals continue to destroy this country and the world itself.
Jerry Brown
#54. I would like to maximize the level of human choice in the medical field ... The choice of a treatment in many ways is like the exercise of religion.
Jerry Brown
#55. My principles are simple. Protect the Earth. Serve the People, and Explore the Universe
Jerry Brown
#56. We have to restore power to the family, to the neighborhood, and the community with a non-market principle, a principle of equality, of charity, of let's-take-care-of-one-another. That's the creative challenge.
Jerry Brown
#57. The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It's a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist system that is breaking down.
Jerry Brown
#58. I reject get-it-done, make-it-happen thinking. I want to slow things down so I understand others better.
Jerry Brown
#59. Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void.
Jerry Brown
#60. The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.
Jerry Brown
#61. It looks to me to be obvious that the whole world cannot eat an American diet.
Jerry Brown
#62. Okay, so what we really have to recognize and own as Americans is that our way of being is itself perhaps the greatest threat to the continuation of civilization.
Jerry Brown
#63. The corporation is an out-of-control Frankenstein.
Jerry Brown
#64. The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government.
Jerry Brown
#65. The reason that everybody likes planning is that nobody has to do anything.
Jerry Brown
#66. It's not viable' for poverty stricken developing world to emulate prosperity of U.S.
Jerry Brown
#67. The big lock-up is about drugs. Here's the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners.
Jerry Brown
#68. My goal in signing these [gun control ] bills is to enhance public safety by tightening our existing laws in a responsible and focused manner, while protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
Jerry Brown
#69. We're going to get that little bug before that little bug gets my poll ratings down any further.
Jerry Brown
#70. After years of struggle, the U.S. Supreme Court today has made same-sex marriage a reality in California ... I have directed the California Department of Public Health to advise the state's counties that they must begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in California
Jerry Brown
#71. We're going to move left and right at the same time.
Jerry Brown
#72. A lot of street crime is horrible, but in terms of the dislocation, the undermining of the family - the corporate criminals, many of whom reside in Congress and the White House - are getting away literally with murder.
Jerry Brown
#73. Let's draw the boundary early not wait until it's obvious like Hitler's Germany and insist that the state shall never, never, take the life of a person!
Jerry Brown
#74. When the farmer can sell directly to the consumer, it is a more active process. There's more contact. The consumer can know, who am I buying this from? What's their name? Do they have a face? Is the food they are selling coming out of Mexico with pesticides?
Jerry Brown
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