Top 100 Koch Quotes
#1. Subsidies and mandates are just two of the privileges that government can bestow on politically connected friends. Others include grants, loans, tax credits, favorable regulations, bailouts, loan guarantees, targeted tax breaks and no-bid contracts.
Charles Koch
#2. The most guileful amongst the reporters are those who appear friendly and smile and seem to be supportive. They are the ones who will seek to gut you on every occasion.
Ed Koch
#3. All of our policies are based on whether it will make - enable people to improve their lives or it will make their lives worse.
Charles Koch
#4. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
Ed Koch
#5. There is no question that I would be the better president. But as for the campaign, are Americans ready for a general election in which both major party candidates are ADD? Quite frankly, it could provide an opening for a third party candidate, maybe someone backed by the evil Koch brothers.
Joe Biden
#6. Oh, sure, they'd insisted I take Washington Wife class after I'd inadvertently insulted the Prime Minster of England, but how could I have known he wasn't willing to admit that the Rolling Stones weren't half the band Aerosmith was and never would be?
Gini Koch
#7. The shock of recognition is a moment of excitement that shakes the soul. It may be hard to describe, but like other forms of love, you will know it when you feel it.
Stephen Koch
#8. I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?
Alexander Koch
#10. Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.
Herman Koch
#11. You ever flown something before?" (Christopher)
"I hold the highest score at A.S.U. for Star Wars: Starfighter." (Kitty)
"I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I'm going to regret this." (Christopher)
Gini Koch
#12. Only a modern army will be able to fight a modern war.
Howard W. Koch
#13. The successful companies try to keep the new entrants down. Now that's great for a company like ours. We make more money that way because we have less competition and less innovation. But for the country as a whole, it's horrible.
Charles Koch
#14. If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.
Ed Koch
#15. Instead of expending time to train yourself not to be afraid of snakes, avoid them altogether.
Richard Koch
#16. But enough of me. Lets talk about you. What do you think of me?
Ed Koch
#17. I thought Paulie could jump. I know he's not fleet of foot, but at least have some hops. I guess we know who is not going to win a gold glove. I was trying to become a spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service.
Billy Koch
#18. You have enchanted me
with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language
Kenneth Koch
#19. The only way you improve is to try new things.
Charles Koch
#20. The knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.
Edward I. Koch
#21. If you never failed, then you're probably not doing very much.
Charles Koch
#22. Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we want lead to high returns.
Richard Koch
#23. During a working day, there's nothing I look forward to more than an evening of nothing at all. A meal. A beer or a glass of wine. The evening news on TV. A B movie or a soccer match. A working day like that gets off on the right foot. It's a day with promise.
Herman Koch
#24. I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.
Christopher Koch
#25. To make a quick buck, but over time, if you're not creating value for others, customers, society, isn't going to let you be around.
Charles Koch
#26. Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may.
- from My Olivetti Speaks
Kenneth Koch
#27. Psychos and megalomaniacs are my forte, remember? They all wanna hang with me
Gini Koch
#28. If it's December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?
Howard E. Koch
#29. Without Claire I wouldn't have been nowhere, but I would have been somewhere else.
Herman Koch
#30. From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.
Alexander Koch
#31. Billionaires like the Koch brothers, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, and political puppet master Karl Rove should not be able to buy our elections. Secret money should not be able to drown out the voices of the American people and sell our Democracy to the highest bidder.
Hank Johnson
#32. What song would lull a snake into submission? "John Mayer?"
"Over my dead body."
"Could be, Tim, could be.
Gini Koch
#33. I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
Kenneth Koch
#34. Most Republicans are not prepared to stand up to the fossil fuel industry because they get a lot of their campaign funds from the Koch brothers and other people in the fossil fuel industry. That tells me why we have to reform our campaign finance system.
Bernie Sanders
#35. Citizens United didn't work. Hey, Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Shellgame Adelson: Democracy trumps money sometimes.
Henry Rollins
#36. By 2009, [Richard] DeVos's son, Dick and daughter-in-law Betsy were major donors on the Koch lust and facing a $5.2 million civil fine of their own for violating Ohio's campaign-finance laws.
Jane Mayer
#37. All writers are obviously neurotic ... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.
Christopher Koch
#38. I looked and felt my head gradually grow cold. It was the sort of coldness you feel when you take too big a bite from an ice-cream cone or sip too greedily from an ice-cold drink. The kind of coldness that hurt - from the inside out.
Herman Koch
#39. If I were running against Chuck Schumer. I would take every one of his Sunday press releases - and there are 52 for as many years as he's been there - and I would ask, 'How many of the things he said he was proposing became law?' I doubt many.
Ed Koch
#40. No longer in print ... There are sentences, and phrases that, in all their simplicity, say much more than they seem to at first: two months to live, never heard of it, dead on arrival ... For a writer, no longer in print must fall somewhere in that category.
Herman Koch
#41. Most power is power to coerce somebody. We don't have the power to coerce anybody.
Charles Koch
#42. Great. I was housing with the Extreme Morning Militants. What a joy.
Gini Koch
#43. Some people need a kick in the ass, others just need to think less for a couple of hours.
Herman Koch
#44. I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.
David H. Koch
#45. But before I ran out and got shot by someone I merely hadn't seen, I examined the remote. There were a lot of buttons on it. None of them were marked. Naturally, I considered hitting some at random but decided I was thrilled to still be alive and unscathed.
Gini Koch
#46. The Republicans are coming - make nice.
Ed Koch
#47. The Koch brothers, through the expenditure of billions of dollars and the creation and support of dozens of extreme right organizations, have taken fringe extremist ideas and made them mainstream within the Republican Party.
Bernie Sanders
#48. When I first went to college, I went to Western Michigan. I had been rejected by a bunch of schools for theater. I was like, 'I'm obviously not cut out for this, so I might as well just go into film.'
Alexander Koch
#49. Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.
Kenneth Koch
#50. Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers.
Charles Koch
#51. 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.
Richard Koch
#52. Oh, good. Okay, I'd like to get more sleep before I have to figure out how we find a Sith Lord in Washington.
Gini Koch
#53. A lot of the Republican rhetoric better than the Democrats'. But when they're in office, it's pretty much the same thing. It's serving their supporters, it's corporate welfare, it's cronyism which is so destructive, particularly to the disadvantaged.
Charles Koch
#54. The person who is bent on killing you will follow you wherever you are.
Ed Koch
#55. You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for one's self-respect to be a punching bag.
Ed Koch
#56. Isn't this history, and aren't we a couple of ruins?
Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun
What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!
Kenneth Koch
#57. If you seek violence, we will seek to put you in jail.
Ed Koch
#58. Make the choice that you want to be happy. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to other people too.
Richard Koch
#59. All is clouded by desire: as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust ...Through these it blinds the soul.
Christopher J. Koch
#60. Some people might say it's not smart to be so insecure about what you wear. But that's not how I see it. The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn't need any help. What does a man know about things like that? a stupid woman thinks, and proceeds to make the wrong choice.
Herman Koch
#61. Welcome to My Super Secret Life, where people try to kill us on a regular basis, and we thwart bad-guy schemes for breakfast. We're almost like a reality show, only without the alcohol and hot tubs.
Gini Koch
#62. Even a cup of coffee tastes so much sweeter because you've come once again out of the, literally, out of the edge of death, and that's the condition I suppose that a lot of artists and writers would like to be in.
Christopher Koch
#63. It is not that we are short of time ... It is the way that we treat time, even the way that we think about it. A time revolution..is the fastest way to make a giant leap in both happiness and effectiveness.
Richard Koch
#64. As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch
#65. Be different-if you don't have the facts and knowledge required, simply listen. When word gets around that you can listen when others tend to talk, you will be treated as a sage.
Ed Koch
#66. We are type designers, punch cutters, wood cutters, type founders, compositors, printers, and book binders from conviction and with passion, not because we are insufficiently talented for other higher things, but because for us the highest things stand in close kinship to those ends
Rudolph Koch
#67. Do I really run like that?" (Kitty)
"Yup," Martini confirmed. "Don't worry, I think it's sexy."
"Thank God. I think I look like a cheetah on drugs.
Gini Koch
#68. Blah, blah, blah. Heard it all before. I'm an American, you moron. We wrote the book on insignificant peasants making good. I'm also not an idiot. And I'm also not buying it." I
Gini Koch
#69. Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.
Christof Koch
#71. When I came in, the city was on the edge of bankruptcy. I'm proud of what I did. I built the foundation that mayors after me built upon - particularly Bloomberg. But the foundation was essential because if it hadn't occurred, we would have been another Detroit.
Ed Koch
#72. I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader ... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice ... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
Kenneth Koch
#73. At Kayenta we were told that the entire Navajo Indian reservation was dry; you couldn't get a drop of alcohol anywhere. Not with dinner,but also not at the supermarket. "It's like Iran," Caroline said, taking a sip of her Coke. "But right in the middle of America.
Herman Koch
#74. Only do the thing we are best at doing and enjoy most.
Richard Koch
#75. A basso sings, and a soprano answers him.
Then there is thunder in a clear blue sky,
And, from the earth, a sigh: This song is finished.
Kenneth Koch
#76. I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
Kenneth Koch
#77. The poorest Americans use three time the energy as the percentage of their income as the average American does. This is going to disproportionately hurt the poor. It may make the whole electric grid unstable, depending on how it is enforced. And it does nothing for the climate.
Charles Koch
#78. Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.
Kenneth Koch
#79. Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world ... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.
Kenneth Koch
#80. There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.
Herman Koch
#81. The way to create something great is to create something simple.
Richard Koch
#82. It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.
Kenneth Koch
#83. We are on dangerous terrain when government picks winners and losers in the economy by subsidizing favored products and industries.
Charles Koch
#84. Repeatedly asking for government help undermines the foundations of society by destroying initiative and responsibility. It is also a fatal blow to efficiency and corrupts the political process.
Charles Koch
#85. My brain is good, but my body is deteriorating. I probably have another two or three years. Or I can pass tomorrow, but it doesn't make a difference to me.
Ed Koch
#86. I probably enjoy campaigning more than most other people in public office because I like people and I enjoy going out there and telling people what I've done.
Ed Koch
#87. I was drafted into the Army when I was 19 and came out at age 22. Most people that I knew didn't think they'd come home alive. I didn't think I would either, so I was happy when I did.
Ed Koch
#88. Should we be rewriting history just to make people feel good? That's not history, that's psychiatry.
Ed Koch
#89. If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.
Richard Koch
#90. You don't have to love them. You just have to respect their rights.
Ed Koch
#91. There is no security for any of us unless there is security for all
Howard W. Koch
#92. Ed Koch had the best line: if you agree with me nine out of twelve times, you should vote for me. If you agree with me twelve out of twelve times, you should find a psychiatrist.
Anthony Scaramucci
#93. One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.
Kenneth Koch
#94. It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.
Richard Koch
#95. You know, once you've stood up to cancer, everything else feels like a pretty easy fight.
David H. Koch
#96. We are not trying to prevent new clean energy businesses from succeeding. Any business that's economical, that can succeed in the marketplace, any form of energy, we're all for. As a matter of fact, we're investing in quite a number of them, ourselves - whether that's ethanol, renewable fuel oil.
Charles Koch
#97. If you don't like the President, it costs you 90 bucks to fly to Washington to picket. If you don't like the governor, it costs you 60 bucks to fly to Albany to picket. If you don't like me - 90 cents.
Ed Koch
#98. 'The Nutcracker' is the ballet that keeps on giving.
David H. Koch
#99. If you listen to Giuliani, it's like nobody did anything to improve the city except him. I'm not part of the history. Bloomberg's not part of the history. It's like, he did it. He's the only one. That's why he's a little crazy.
Ed Koch
#100. I love being the mayor. I want to be the mayor forever.
Ed Koch
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