Quotes About Interest Groups

#1. But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.

Barbara Jordan

#2. This, by the way, is the welfare state in action: Its a whole bunch of special interest groups screwing consumers and taxpayers, and making them think they're really benefiting.

Murray Rothbard

#3. James Madison made clear in Federalist 51 that that this elaborate structure - today often derided as " gridlock " - was created to protect individual freedom against oppression by the majority or by powerful interest groups who exploit government power for their own purposes.

Anonymous

#4. If individuals do not occupy their legitimate position, then it will be occupied by a god or a king or a coalition of interest groups. If citizens do not exercise the powers confered by their legitimacy, others will do so.
(I - The Great Leap Backwards)

John Ralston Saul

#5. I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

Salman Rushdie

#6. The venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday's America into a fantasy that might better service the political issues of today.

Jim Webb

#7. If you look at all the lobbyists in Washington, this is not a democracy. This is ruled by special interest groups. That includes the military, the pharmaceutical industry, the people who produce mechanized debt, GMO foods. We are prisoners.

Deepak Chopra

#8. Politicians pay more attention to interest groups than to the public interest.

Alice Rivlin

#9. I'm not a caterer. I just have to stay with my creative convictions. At some point, you have to just get past the special-interest groups and do what you're there to do, which is make a movie.

Ron Howard

#10. We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

Grover Norquist

#11. The essential task of Canadian statesmanship is to discover the terms on which as many as possible of the significant interest groups of our country can be induced to work together in common policy.

Frank Underhill

#12. It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest.

Iris Chang

#13. I've owned a business for 26 years. My family isn't in politics and my supporters aren't special interest groups in Madison and Milwaukee.

Mark Neumann

#14. There was room for a Democrat to break with the interest groups and to vote for Roberts. (Hillary Clinton) could have because she has credentials of thirty-years standing.

Calvin Jillson

#15. The reality is that the special interest groups that have lobbied against Free Choice Vouchers object to any measure that would empower employees to have a say in their health benefits because it begins to erode their power in the current health care system.

Ron Wyden

#16. Was it a good idea to spend taxpayer dollars on electric cars in Finland, or on windmills in China? Was it a good idea to borrow all this money from countries like China and spend it on all these various different interest groups?

Paul Ryan

#17. But all liberals only have empathy for the exact same victims - always the ones that are represented by powerful liberal interest groups.

Ann Coulter

#18. The different Washington, D.C.-based groups and the different special interest groups, they all want to be able to pick who they want to be a senator. They don't speak for everyone, and they definitely don't speak for Oklahomans.

James Lankford

#19. The problem is, of course, that these interest groups are all asking for changes, but their enthusiasm for change rapidly disappears when it affects the core of their own interests.

Angela Merkel

#20. American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all.

William J. Mitchell

#21. It has been shown that public participation can limit powerful interest groups, while competing interests can help find a reasonable balance between development and environmental protection.

Ma Jun

#22. To be fair, lying is part and parcel of public life. Every politician has lied about something because they are owned by the special interest groups that finance their elections.

Peter Schuyler

#23. Through sites like MySpace, people coalesce into interest groups, and this gives me the opportunity to do vast mailshots to people who like similar things.

Martin Millar

#24. I have always felt that public, commercial and community organisations should be as open as possible about their affairs. They need to be accountable to their owners, their customers, their members and communities and other interest groups.

Laisenia Qarase

#25. Much of what candidates have to do is raise money and appeal to constituencies or interest groups that can provide that money.

Robert Scheer

#26. There is an abundance of misinformation, exaggeration, and blatant lies being spread by interest groups regarding the prospects for embryonic stem cell research.

Virginia Foxx

#27. Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.

George Will

#28. My own views on abortion, I'm not on either pole of that and neither of the interest groups on either end of this issue would probably be comfortable with my views.

Stephen Harper

#29. Storytelling may be what most distinguishes social movements from interest groups.

Marshall Ganz

#30. The United Nations has come under the control of outlaw nations and self-serving special interest groups.

Ginny Brown-Waite

#31. Political scientists after World War II hypothesized that even though the voices of individual Americans counted for little, most people belonged to a variety of interest groups and membership organizations - clubs, associations, political parties, unions - to which politicians were responsive.

Robert Reich

#32. It takes courage to set priorities because doing so is an admission that American policy cannot be all things to all people - or rather to all interest groups

Condoleezza Rice

#33. Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future's forgotten men.

Amity Shlaes

#34. My good friend Walter Mondale is a good lapdog. He'll give them [special interest groups] everything they want. He'll lick every hand.

Ernest Hollings

#35. In U.S. politics, 'compassion' means giving money and privileges to well organized interest groups at everyone else's expense.

Paul Craig Roberts

#36. What is happening to teachers now across this nation is a disgrace. The attacks on them are a blot on our nation. Teachers and students are not different interest groups. Anyone who demeans teachers demeans education and hurts children.

Diane Ravitch

#37. I think growing up in a small town is a good foundation for anyone who decides to enter politics. You get to know people as individuals, not as blocs or members of special interest groups.

Ronald Reagan

#38. Bulgaria has been deindustrialized by interest groups who extracted state assets like oil states extract the oil in their ground.

Ivan Krastev

#39. Career politicians do not have the courage to prioritize spending and say no to demanding special interest groups who do not reflect the best interests of the country.

Tom Coburn

#40. Today's Democrats are little more than a collection of narrow interest groups-unions, tort lawyers, minorities headed by an ossified leadership. They are clever, tenacious and increasingly nasty in defending their perks, as establishments typically are ...

Robert L. Bartley

#41. The U.S. Senate does not allow legislative provisions to be included in appropriations bills, for much the same reason that most Americans are concerned about earmarks: it creates a slippery slope by which lobbyists and special interest groups can sneak provisions into large, must-pass legislation.

Ron Wyden

#42. Heads of state are actually prisoners of special interest groups.

Deepak Chopra

#43. Who is in charge? Is it taxpayers or is it the special interest groups?

Scott Walker

#44. American politicians are responsive almost solely to the interests and desires of their rich constituents and interest groups that primarily represent big business.

Alex Pareene

#45. Politicians will pander to special-interest groups eager to gain at the public expense.

Donald J. Boudreaux

#46. You know the way Washington works. Once you start floating ideas, they are immediately attacked by all the different interest groups before the ideas can be brought to fruition.

Judd Gregg

#47. Politicians make decisions in favor of their interest groups or their supporters back in their hometowns.

Tadashi Yanai

#48. Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing.

Greg Ginn

#49. You write things that are of interest to you. There's no focus group.

Zach Galifianakis

#50. Some writers research in order to write. I write in order to research topics that interest me. Especially if I can meet with other people, in forums from illness support groups to phone-sex hotlines, and learn what other people know best.

Chuck Palahniuk

#51. Why is it that we all say we hate our hypocritical politicians being controlled by special interests groups, and every election...we vote them in again.

Colleen Hitchcock

#52. Private prisons have a special interest in tapping the burgeoning immigrant groups to fill beds and cells, especially in the post-9/11 period of the so-called "war on terror." The

Mark Lewis Taylor

#53. If you are a minority or an interest group, the Democrats will hold the debate at your house. Whereas Republicans take a slightly different approach: they have a big tent - you're just not allowed in it.

Jon Stewart

#54. A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.

Seth Godin

#55. [U]nless oppressed groups stick together, and on alliances of self interest rather than do-goodism; nothing can be accomplished in the long run to dismantle the apparatus of oppression.

Shulamith Firestone

#56. Of course, on a job, you have a shared common interest in the fact that you're there making a movie or making a TV show, and that creates unification within a group. There has to be something more than just the work for that to continue on, for that friendship to continue on.

Jamie Campbell Bower

#57. All experts on WHO advisory groups for developing norms, standards and guidelines are required to disclose interests regarding the advisory committee's area of work. If a declared interest is potentially significant, then the expert is either excluded from the meeting or given a restricted role.

Margaret Chan

#58. Once a bureau is created, its staff becomes a tenacious political interest group, well placed to defend its budget and to make a case for expanding its activities.

Robert Higgs

#59. I do covers for CDs and LPs of music that I like, reissues of old-time music, and then I'm inspired to make some kind of drawing based on this love of the music. I don't do album covers or CD covers for groups or musicians I don't like or have no interest in.

Robert Crumb

#60. I think female-female relationships interest me so much more because they're so encoded. There is kind of a psychic element that happens within groups of women.

Heidi Julavits

#61. Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups

Paul Krugman

#62. The method of rule of the tyrant and the oligarch is quite simply to clobber, coerce, or overawe all or most other groups in the interest of their own.

Bernard Crick

#63. The collective influence of you and the other leaders will bring the rest along. If this does not happen, divided interest and loyalty will occur within the group.

John C. Maxwell

#64. That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires - smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge - are basically solitary pursuits.

Fran Lebowitz

#65. You can't be all things to all people.

Michael Porter

#66. When men organize themselves into groups, and they make rules based on common or self-interest, it's always tangled and political.

Andrew Dominik