Best Public Policy Quotes

#1. The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted.

Elizabeth Dole

#2. What you always do before you make a decision is consult. The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted. Then, once policy is determined, you call on them to help you sell it.

Elizabeth Dole

#3. Power tends to protect itself merely to maintain its own status and control. Principle gives up power for the sake of creating the best public policy.

Dan Webster

#4. Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith?

Barack Obama

#5. According to a Public Policy Polling survey, most Americans find lice and colonoscopies more appealing than Capitol Hill.

Ron Fournier

#6. When there's a vacuum of public input, lobbyists usually fill it. But when there's public input, the people usually win.

Morgan Carroll

#7. Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy.

David Harsanyi

#8. Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

Andrea Barrett

#9. Advocacy groups and voters are not wrong to push candidates to declare their position clearly on policy issues. That is good citizenship. Hard questions should be asked of every candidate, every politician. And those public servants should be prepared to answer, but in their own words.

Mark McKinnon

#10. The intelligent minority are a "specialized class" who are responsible for setting policy and for "the formation of a sound public opinion,

Noam Chomsky

#11. The weapons-violence hypothesis is far too simplistic a basis on which to base sound public policy.

Daniel D. Polsby

#12. The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.

Ludwig Von Mises

#13. Despite our significant public-policy differences, I commend Jim Wallis for advocating religious belief as an invaluable resource in addressing the urgent moral and social crises of our time.

Richard Land

#14. In recent years, academics, policy-makers, and experts have raised the question of the applicability of peacetime environmental law in times of armed conflict.

Widad Akreyi

#15. Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives

Barry Goldwater

#16. The premise of my whole campaign has been not that people need to believe what I say to them, but they need to look at what I have done. And what I have done in the state of Nevada, I have voted over a 100 times against tax and fee increases, poor public policy, and unconstitutional bills.

Sharron Angle

#17. A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude.

Calvin Coolidge

#18. Wishful thinking is not sound public policy.

Bjorn Lomborg

#19. Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.

Eric Ries

#20. Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

Bill Gates

#21. When making public policy decisions about new technologies for the Government, I think one should ask oneself which technologies would best strengthen the hand of a police state. Then, do not allow the Government to deploy those technologies.

Phil Zimmermann

#22. Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical.

Margaret Fuller

#23. In Utah alone, ten million acres are open for business. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests.

Terry Tempest Williams

#24. It is an old adage that honesty is the best policy-this applies to public as well as private life-to States as well as individuals.

George Washington

#25. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.

George Washington

#26. Good policy always trumps bad public relations. And the best PR can't trump bad policy.

Bob Schieffer

#27. As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.

Tony Kushner

#28. Obama wanted to offer his support to birth control activist Sandra Fluke. He wanted to express his disappointment that she has been the subject of inappropriate personal attacks and thank her for exercising her rights as a citizen to speak out on an issue of public policy.

Jay Carney

#29. Compassion is not a dirty word. Compassion is not a sign of weakness. In my view, compassion in politics and in public policy is in fact a hallmark of great strength. It is a hallmark of a society which has about it a decency which speaks for itself.

Kevin Rudd

#30. Tariffs, government contracts, naval and military spending, nationalized industries, tax policy, social welfare, the legal privileging of labor unions were among the means at the disposal of the governing class to exploit the public at large for the benefits of its various clienteles.

Ralph Raico

#31. The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.

Eugene Jarecki

#32. Democracy cannot function or survive without a sufficient medium by which citizens remain informed and engaged in public policy debates.

Nancy Snow

#33. Nothing disturbs me more than superficiality and mere sloganizing on matters of public policy, and the suspicion that what the speaker is saying represents the full extent of his knowledge on the subject.

Preston Manning

#34. Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].

Alan Blinder

#35. 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.

Gloria Allred

#36. No Child Left Behind ... is a giraffe with an elephant's body ... You can't take the vision of Ted Kennedy and merge it to the public policy of George Bush and come out with anything that works.

Steve Rauschenberger

#37. Universality has been severely reduced: it is virtually dead as a concept in most areas of public policy.

Stephen Harper

#38. There is a thought that poverty is a public policy failure; poverty is man-made by action and non-action: poverty can be eliminated.

Benjamin Mkapa

#39. Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs,
our policy against narcotics
like any public policy
comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings
are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.

Joel Miller

#40. The first country to adopt happiness as an official goal of public policy is the tiny little country of Bhutan in Asia near China and India.

Derek Bok

#41. The social construction of public administration concerns itself less with how policy

Jong S. Jun

#42. If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?

Alan Alda

#43. The issue is not that morals be applied to public policy, it's that conservatives bring public policy to spheres of our lives where it should not enter.

Barney Frank

#44. 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.

Christina Romer

#45. I was quite convinced that I didn't want to be a lawyer. But I felt that law school would be a useful way to understand public policy and to understand business in this environment.

Kevin Warsh

#46. Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

William Ewart Gladstone

#47. 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.

Gerald R. Ford

#48. The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#49. When the target of crime is armed, there is more law present, more public policy present, and more public interest served than by all 20,000 gun laws in force.

John Longenecker

#50. Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.

Kamala Harris