Quotes About Citizens United

#1. I have introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and make it clear that the Congress and state legislatures do have the ability and the power to regulate and get corporate funding out of political campaigns.

Bernie Sanders

#2. Citizens United didn't work. Hey, Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Shellgame Adelson: Democracy trumps money sometimes.

Henry Rollins

#3. On the subject of money and politics and the rest, I have a DARE: Disclose who are these people; Amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United; Reform: let's have public financing of campaigns; and Empower.

Nancy Pelosi

#4. With Citizens United, the Supreme Court's declaration that corporations are people, the whims of one can silence the voices of millions.

Christine Pelosi

#5. Here is what the practical impact of Citizens United means. What Citizens United means is that corporations call hundreds of millions of dollars into television ads, radio ads, and other forms of advertising to defeat those candidates who stand up and take them on.

Bernie Sanders

#6. The SuperPACs and the Citizens United ruling that gives corporations a voice in the political process are all bad news. They made it so you can now lie, and the politician being promoted on that lie will not be held responsible for it.

Jesse Ventura

#7. It's why we oppose Citizens United from that right-wing Supreme Court. In 2012, I also said the Tea Party "acted like terrorists" and called a donut shop manager in Milwaukee who wanted lower taxes a "smartass." And I said the number one issue is a three-letter word, J-O-B-S." I'm proud of who I am.

Joe Biden

#8. The Supreme Court decided that corporations are people and they have the right of free speech and the right without disclosure - all of this is through the Citizens United Supreme Court decision - to put as much money as they want into campaigns all over the country.

Bernie Sanders

#9. All Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech. We now have, I think, the most free and open system we've had in modern times.

Mitch McConnell

#10. One of the reasons this election is so important is because the Supreme Court hangs in the balance. We need to overturn that terrible Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, and then reform our whole campaign finance system.

Hillary Clinton

#11. The Citizens United ruling did not invent special-interest spending; it enables corporations and unions to advocate directly on behalf of a candidate rather than running more subtle 'issue ads.'

Nina Easton

#12. For the first 200 years of our nation's history, corporations were never defined by the courts as persons with free speech rights under the First Amendment. Only in recent years have we witnessed this corporate takeover of our First Amendment, culminating in the Citizens United ruling.

John Bonifaz

#13. History will record that the Citizens United decision is one of the worst in the history of our country.

Bernie Sanders

#14. Citizens United said that transparency would be the disinfectant, but (c)(4)'s are warm, wet, moist incubators. There is no disinfectant.

Stephen Colbert

#15. Nobody has been arrested on Wall Street for the crash of 2008. They're not paying their fair share of the taxes. And now with the Citizens United case of the Supreme Court, they get to buy politicians up out in the open.

Michael Moore

#16. Resurrecting American democracy is vital to averting climate catastrophe. We must first repeal the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which has flooded elections with billions of oily petrodollars from carbon tycoons.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#17. In 'Citizens United v. FEC', the Supreme Court ruled that sections of the federal campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold imposed unconstitutional restrictions on the First Amendment rights of corporations.

Eric Schneiderman

#18. If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be Citizens United. I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#19. The DISCLOSE Act is a testament to the wisdom of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United. The First Amendment sought to place political speech beyond the government's control, and we can be glad that it did.

Bradley A. Smith

#20. Citizens United fought to defend our right to free speech - and won a great victory in the United States Supreme Court.

Marsha Blackburn

#21. The first case I sat on ... was Citizens United. Talk about being thrown in. Needless to say, if I was scared before, I was terrified.

Sonia Sotomayor

#22. The next time you download a book on Kindle, buy a Michael Moore screed at Barnes & Noble, or order up a political movie from video on demand, remember that it is the Supreme Court's decision in 'Citizens United' that guarantees you the right to do so.

Bradley A. Smith

#23. Hillary Clinton will nominate justices to the Supreme Court who are prepared to overturn Citizens United!

Bernie Sanders

#24. The entire future of marriage rests with Justice Anthony Kennedy, the man who declared in Citizens United that corporations are people with constitutional rights. I just hope he doesn't do anything rash, like declare that homosexuals are people with constitutional rights.

Stephen Colbert

#25. Politically, as a result of Citizens United, billionaires are now able to spend as much money as they want on campaigns, which means that you have a political system which is heavily dominated by corporations and wealthy individuals.

Bernie Sanders

#26. On January 21st of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced. We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone. But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens.

Donald Trump

#27. The United States remains deeply concerned that, to date, no individuals have been convicted for the 1999 killings of U.S. citizens Agron, Ylli, and Mehmet Bytyqi.

Victoria Nuland

#28. To me, terrorists should not be able to hide behind their passports and their citizenship, and that includes U.S. citizens, whether they are overseas or whether they are here in the United States. What we need to do is to apply the appropriate tool and the appropriate response.

John O. Brennan

#29. On one side, citizens have great respect for the United States; they have a great feeling of friendship. That is solid. But in the opposition and in the political arena I often find criticism of the closeness of relations with the United States. That is a reality.

Vicente Fox

#30. Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room.

Eric Liu

#31. American Christians have been woefully silent on important issues. I am an American citizens now, and I love this country, but I see symptoms in the United States that I saw in Austria in 1938 when the Nazi Germans were terrorizing Europe.

Maria Von Trapp

#32. It is not only our duty to America, but also to Ireland. We could not hope to succeed in our effort to make Ireland a Republic without the moral and material support of the liberty-loving citizens of these United States.

Thomas Francis Meagher

#33. A nation to be strong, must be united; to be united, must be equal in condition; to be equal in condition, must be similar inhabits and feeling; to be similar in habits and feeling, must be raised in national institutions as the children of a common family, and citizens of a common country.

Frances Wright

#34. It is interesting to note that an overwhelming majority of citizens in the world's three largest democracies have different religions: India (81 percent Hindu), the United States (76 percent Christian), and Indonesia (87 percent Muslim). Two of them have elected women as leaders of their government.

Jimmy Carter

#35. More than 1 million U.S. citizens live in Mexico, and my country remains the largest source of immigrants to the United States.

Enrique Pena Nieto

#36. It's one thing to stick to your guns. It's quite another to hold those guns to the heads of your citizens.

Lori Goodwin

#37. Schools exist in America and have always existed to train responsible citizens of the United States of America. If they don't do that, it's very hard to hold us together as a country, because it's shared values that hold us together.

Rudy Giuliani

#38. Therefore every person born within the United States, its territories or districts, whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural born citizen in the sense of the Constitution, and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining to that capacity.

William Rawle

#39. When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

Barack Obama

#40. The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.

James Madison

#41. The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

George Washington

#42. The president doesn't order the military to seize political opponents. He doesn't order his intelligence community to lie about national security for political purposes. He uses the military or intelligence communities to protect the United States and our citizens, not to help him win elections.

Kathleen Troia McFarland

#43. The Congress of the United States, in recognition of the unique contribution of the Bible in shaping the history and character of this Nation, and so many of its citizens, has by Senate Joint Resolution 165 authorized and requested the President to designate the year 1983 as the 'Year of the Bible.'

Ronald Reagan

#44. Although I have to leave you as mayor soon, I resume the much more honorable title of citizen of New York, and citizen of the United States.

Rudy Giuliani

#45. I worry that the Senate is working to consider a series of little-noticed provisions in comprehensive immigration reform that may provide a pathway to a national ID card for all individuals present in the United States - citizens and noncitizens,

Rand Paul

#46. My brothers, the United States Bishops, have reminded us, all are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it.

Pope Francis

#47. Under unitary executive theory, the [George W.]Bush administration has claimed the right to seize American citizens in the United States and imprison them indefinitely without a charge.

Dick Durbin

#48. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.

Susan B. Anthony

#49. Gov. Romney has claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain and people are wanting to know, is there proof of that claim? And was it U.S. jobs created for United States citizens?

Sarah Palin

#50. If children do not understand the Constitution, they cannot understand how our government functions, or what their rights and responsibilities are as citizens of the United States.

John Roberts

#51. Forget the conspiracy theories! God gave us the right to vote, and He gave the United States, and all of its citizens, freedom through democracy.

Monica Johnson

#52. With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.

Barack Obama

#53. however, is that there is no alternative. Communist societies, social democracies, and even modest social welfare states like the United States have all failed, the neoliberals proclaim, and their citizens have accepted neoliberalism as the only feasible course.

Noam Chomsky

#54. I am prepared to vote in support of a new military authorization that specifically authorizes U.S. military actions against ISIS. We must stand up against this vile enemy and protect United States citizens both at home and abroad.

Bradley Byrne

#55. The United States grants the favors of the second, third, or fifty-seventh chance, and its citizens remain free to invent for themselves whatever character draws a crowd or pays the rent.

Bill Vaughan

#56. Despite the legacy of slavery, the near extermination of native Americans, and persistent racial, sexual, and social discrimination, the citizens of the United States could plausibly claim, in 1945, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth.

John Lewis Gaddis

#57. Forty four percent of Republican voters believe President [Barack] Obama was not born in the United States. They believe he is not a legal citizen of the United States.They believe his presidency is unconstitutional.

Lawrence O'Donnell

#58. Can anyone name a president who really had the citizens in mind during the majority of his decisions in office? None of them did, and the current ones don't either. It's all about power, keeping power, and dishing out power to those who throw the most money at them.

Charlie Donlea

#59. The fact that so many of your people are today residents and citizens of the United States, lending their influence to our civic and economic life, which has meant so much to our development.

Frank B. Kellogg

#60. On almost all issues, citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates
as intended.

Noam Chomsky

#61. I want you and the people of Israel to know a few things that have not and will not change. The United States stands firmly with Israel, and we have a rock solid commitment to the security of Israel and to the security of its citizens.

Leon Panetta

#62. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?

Alice Walker

#63. I believe in a reasonable amount of "right to bear arms". But private citizens of the United States are not allowed to own nuclear weapons. I always wanted a nuclear weapon, if I could have gotten one. I'm every other kind of power, but I'm not a nuclear power.

Ted Turner

#64. Isil poses a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East - including American citizens, personnel and facilities. If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States.

Barack Obama

#65. It is changing the face of terrorism. It is basically bringing it to the United States, to our great citizens. We know the terrorists are barbaric and murderers that attack innocent civilians, as they did in this case.

Hugh Shelton

#66. Women are in many ways second-class citizens in the United States in 2016, because of the way that we're portrayed in popular culture.

Geena Davis

#67. President David O. McKay declared: "No greater immediate responsibility rests upon members of the Church, upon all citizens of this Republic and of neighboring Republics than to protect the freedom vouchsafed by the Constitution of the United States." (Conference Report, April 1950, p. 37.)

Ezra Taft Benson

#68. The White House looked into a plan that would allow illegal immigrants to stay in the United States. The plan called for a million Mexicans to marry a million of our ugliest citizens.

Dennis Miller

#69. What the United States call democracy is actually a vertical model of remote governance by oligarchs - economic barons and their political representatives. The result is that citizens in the United States have little control over what the U.S. government does.

S. Brian Willson

#70. The United States, which would live on Christian principles with all of the peoples of the world, cannot omit a fair deal for its own Indian citizens.

Harry S. Truman

#71. We reaffirm that on days like this, there are no Republicans or Democrats. We are Americans, united in concern for our fellow citizens.

Barack Obama

#72. Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.

Dahlia Lithwick

#73. Every human being born within the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.

John Bingham

#74. Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

Michael Ignatieff

#75. The Imperial German Government will not expect the Government of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment.

William Jennings Bryan

#76. America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.

George W. Bush

#77. Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

Milton Friedman

#78. One of the great strengths of the United States is ... we have a very large Christian population - we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

Barack Obama

#79. United States could be a great country. It needs to be a great country. It's our responsibility as citizens to make that happen, every single one of us.

Paul Haggis

#80. Louisiana, as ceded by France to the United States, is made a part of the United States; its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights and obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the United States, in analogous situations.

Thomas Jefferson

#81. The very controversial National Identification Act of 1991, requiring all United States citizens to carry identification, has greatly enhanced the ability of law enforcement officers to identify criminals and terrorists.

Richard Lamm

#82. The constitution shall never be construed ... to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.

Alexander Hamilton

#83. As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.

Samantha Power

#84. By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Alexander Hamilton

#85. Here in the United States our Muslim citizens are making many contributions in business, science and law, medicine and education, and in other fields ... [they are]upholding our nation's ideals of liberty and justice in a world at peace.

George W. Bush

#86. The United States is an easy country to love because you can take it on faith that, at some point in every waking hour of the day, there is among your fellow citizens a vast exaltation of opinions that test the outer boundaries of the Crazoid.

Charles P. Pierce

#87. Insurgents have capitalized on popular resentment and anger towards the United States and the Iraqi government to build their own political, financial and military support, and the faith of Iraqi citizens in their new government has been severely undermined.

Tom Lantos

#88. Have a lot of respect for the responsibility that journalists have to ask tough questions, to hold the administration accountable and to be advocates for the citizens of the United States.

Josh Earnest

#89. This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America

Paul Robeson

#90. I believe that the United States has a moral obligation to stand up for those citizens of the world who cannot stand up for themselves, and I am proud to have authored the bill signed into law today that continues to put significant pressure on the brutal Burmese military junta.

Joseph Crowley

#91. There should be no bitterness or hate where the sole thought is the welfare of the United States of America. No man can occupy the office of President without realizing that he is President of all the people.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#92. At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation; and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.

George Washington

#93. There is a place in the United States for the Negro. They are real American citizens, and at home. They have fought and bled and died, like men, to make this country what it is. And if they have got to suffer and die, and be lynched, and tortured, and burned at the stake, I say they are at home.

Amanda Smith

#94. Mr. Chairman, delegates, and fellow citizens: I am honored by the support of this convention for vice president of the United States. I accept the duty to help lead our nation out of a jobs crisis and back to prosperity - and I know we can do this.

Paul Ryan

#95. The United States of America took a giant step toward a totalitarian socialist government when the Supreme Court voted to uphold Obamacare, allowing the individual mandate for the government to force American citizens to buy health insurance whether they want to or not.

Charlie Daniels

#96. I'm not looking to be anyone's vice president. I looking to be the president of the United States. Or, I'll be a private citizen, there's nothing wrong with being a private citizen.

Marco Rubio

#97. And we are in a strange conundrum. You can kill an American citizen overseas. But according to this administration, if you capture him in the United States, they've got to be read their Miranda rights.

John McCain

#98. This point seems counter-intuitive, given the amount of conspicuous vulgarity, vice, and immorality in America. Indeed some Islamic fundamentalists argue that their regimes are morally superior to the United States because they seek to foster virtue among the citizens.

Dinesh D'Souza

#99. I believe that Canada cannot, indeed, that Canada must not survive by force. The country will only remain united - it should only remain united - if its citizens want to live together in one civil society.

Pierre Trudeau

#100. The issue of war or peace is an issue that concerns not only experts on Foreign Affairs but every citizen of the United States.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh