Top 100 Quotes About Legislators
#1. In the Illinois State Capitol, in Springfield, farmer-legislators write the agriculture laws.
Bill Dedman
#2. Legislators need to support privacy to establish consumer confidence.
Marc Rotenberg
#3. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. I consider abortion to be a deeply personal and intimate issue for women and I don't believe male legislators should even vote on the issue.
Alan K. Simpson
#5. In Illinois, where legislators are paid $45,000, plus as much as $10,000 for leadership work, about half are full-time politicians.
Bill Dedman
#6. The Moral Majority supports legislators who oppose abortions but also oppose child nutrition and day care. From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.
Barney Frank
#7. Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#8. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
William S. Burroughs
#9. Henry M. Jackson, congressman and senator from 1941 until his death in 1983, achieved far greater renown than most legislators, ran for president in 1972 and 1976, and was for much of the 1970s and 1980s one of the most powerful men in America.
Elliott Abrams
#10. The trouble with this country," he said, "is that the women have no guts.They'd rather slink off and have a dangerous, illegal operation performed than change the laws. The legislators are all men, and men don't bear babies; they can afford to be moralistic.
Michael Crichton
#11. In 1984, I gave a speech at Notre Dame titled 'Religious Belief and Public Morality.' I said that Catholic legislators will live by the laws of the church because we want to stay in the club.
Mario Cuomo
#12. Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.
John Locke
#13. There are no tests similar to SATs to tell us how much undergraduates know. State legislators, who appropriate billions of dollars each year to higher education, are naturally interested in finding out what they are getting for their money.
Derek Bok
#14. Our nation was founded with a bunch of founding legislators who joined together to move our country out of the blocks and get us started, and every generation since then has found a way to advance the ball down the field.
Cory Booker
#15. My favorite Congressional incongruity: ... Red State legislators galumphing from meeting to meeting in full pancake makeup. Estee Lauder may well make more money on Capitol Hill than in Beverly Hills.
Frank Bruni
#16. And I agree that the Democratic legislators in Massachusetts might have given some advice to Republicans in Congress about how to cooperate. But the fact of the matter is we used the same advisers and they say it's the same plan.
Barack Obama
#17. Lobby - a peculiar institution for bribing, bulldozing, and corrupting the legislators who were supposed to represent the people's interests.
Jack London
#18. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.
Henry David Thoreau
#19. The men who mine coal and fire furnaces and balance ledgers and turn lathes and pick cotton and heal the sick and plant corn - all serve as proudly, and as profitably, for America as the statesmen who draft treaties and the legislators who enact laws.
George Washington
#20. Energy and environmental regulation, transportation, and broadband policy all benefit when legislators have a basic grounding in the technical concepts behind business models, products, and innovation.
John Sununu
#21. The Universal Declaration ... as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations ... it not only crystallizes the political thought of our times on these matters, but it has also influenced the thinking of legislators all over the world.
Dag Hammarskjold
#22. Our nation, which possesses greater resources than any other, is rent, from center to circumference, with party strife, political intrigues, and sectional interest; our counselors are panic stricken, our legislators are astonished, and our senators are confounded.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#23. Legislators are interested in their pet projects, getting re-elected, and popularity contests.
Bud Grant
#24. Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of their age, and the legislators of science.
Samuel Johnson
#25. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
Bruce Sterling
#26. This source of corruption, alas, is inherent in the democratic system itself, and it can only be controlled, if at all, by finding ways to encourage legislators to subordinate ambition to principle.
James L. Buckley
#27. Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there's no hierarchy.
Barney Frank
#28. When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P. J. O'Rourke
#29. And, in the past, it has been all too easy for legislators to load costs onto business in order to meet broader social goals. And costs for business means costs for consumers.
John Hutton
#31. In general, however, these gentlemen, the reformers, legislators, and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law.
Frederic Bastiat
#32. Ted Kennedy will go down in history as one of the giants of the U.S. Senate and one the most accomplished legislators in American history.
Bernie Sanders
#33. If you force legislators to balance, at the end of the day, if it has to be balanced, then they step up and they become legislators and can find out where to cut.
Rand Paul
#34. It is unthinkable to allow complete strangers, whether individually or collectively as state legislators or others in government, to make such personal decisions for someone else.
Sarah Weddington
#35. That the equalization of property exercises an influence on political society was clearly understood even by some of the old legislators. Laws were made by Solon and others prohibiting an individual from possessing as much land as he pleased;
Aristotle.
#36. The accountability of state legislators is so much more than federal legislators.
Rob Woodall
#37. I am proud to join the many state legislators, governors, businessmen and hard-working Americans who have worked to build support and momentum for the idea of the Health Care Compact, and I am proud to introduce the common-sense bill for this sensible solution.
James Lankford
#38. It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or, of remedying it.
Josiah Warren
#39. He felt a giant among pygmies, a pike among crappies, as he stood there among the legislators, most of whom owed him for flavors - special bills passed for their law clients, state jobs for constituents, " contributions" for their personal campaign funds, and so on.
A.J. Liebling
#40. I remember when I was a young social worker, the first time I went to the state capital in Arizona, where I eventually served for seven years, I was so nervous to go and lobby my state legislators. Because I only had a master's degree at the time in social work.
Kyrsten Sinema
#41. Legislators invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.
Thomas Jefferson
#42. Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban.
Charles Platt
#43. Washington, of course, aside from being one of the most mismanaged, crime-ridden cities on the planet, is a place where 535 federal legislators and about 38,000 lobbyists work at confiscating and redistributing the incomes of the American people.
Charley Reese
#44. Judges are required by our democratic system not to overstep their positions to become policy makers or super-legislators.
Chuck Grassley
#45. The Constitution overrides a statute, but a statute, if consistent with the Constitution, overrides the law of judges. In this sense, judge-made law is secondary and subordinate to the law that is made by legislators.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
#46. The most effective executive branch officials try to help legislators develop explanations for the votes they are being asked to take.
Robert Zoellick
#47. The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
Ben Okri
#48. As legislators and as Members of Congress, it is our obligation to speak up for those who are being ignored in our society. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) does just that.
Gwen Moore
#49. Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill.
Matt Taibbi
#50. Most of us believe that women can do what men do. The challenge is to convince employers, legislators, mothers, that men can do what women do.
Karen DeCrow
#51. The Constitution is the origin and measure of legislative authority. It says to legislators, thus far ye shall go and no farther. Not a particle of it should be shaken; not a pebble of it should be removed ...
William Paterson
#52. Lobbying is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators.
Ayn Rand
#53. The constant need for special waivers is symptomatic of poorly written public policy. It's a signal that the cost of compliance is unreasonably high; the benefits are hard to measure; and either legislators or regulators have failed to do their homework.
John Sununu
#54. We live in a stage of politics, where legislators seem to regard the passage of laws as much more important than the results of their enforcement.
William Howard Taft
#55. Those who have heard or read anything from me on the subject, know that one of the principal points insisted on is, the forming of societies or any other artificial combinations IS the first, greatest, and most fatal mistake ever committed by legislators and by reformers.
Josiah Warren
#56. Why are we mute? Where are our leaders, our legislators? Where is the church?
Harry Belafonte
#57. A good conscience is never lawless in the worst regulated state, and will provide those laws for itself, which the neglect of legislators hath forgotten to supply.
Henry Fielding
#58. Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) - Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists - but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf.
Katha Pollitt
#59. When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
Edmund Burke
#60. For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.
Aristotle.
#61. Let us tell our legislators in advance, that this is a right, restraints on which, we will not, cannot bear; and that every attempt to restrain it is a palpable wrong on God and man.
Gerrit Smith
#62. all. Unfortunately, polarizing influences - such as unions that want what they want, gay rights groups, isolationists, and others who cannot or will not consider the opinions of others - have become stronger in recent years, robbing from the pool of moderate legislators and increasing the numbers
Ben Carson
#63. Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we now have is a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, including the legislators who have become bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.
Milton Friedman
#64. The 'Occupy' movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning 'the corporation as a person,' and some legislators are supporting that concept.
John Battelle
#65. The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat.
Thomas Paine
#66. We're going to march on Washington with a host of Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, legislators.
Gray Davis
#67. Like most other states, Illinois has little regulation of the economic interests of legislators and relies on public disclosure to keep the lawmaking honest.
Bill Dedman
#68. As attorney general, I can either look into it or I can ignore it because they're a bunch of powerful legislators ... and I'm afraid they're going to cut my budget.
Ben Chandler
#69. It is profoundly troubling when you have Supreme Court justices not following their judicial oath. And taking the role of policy makers and legislators, rather than being judges.
Ted Cruz
#70. Legislators could certainly do with a school of morals.
Simon Bolivar
#71. Legislators consistently put the political imperative before the national interest.
Doug Bandow
#72. Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.
Thomas Jefferson
#73. It is time that we labored for the happiness of the people. Legislators who are to bring light and order into the world must pursue their course with inexorable tread, fearless and unswerving as the sun.
Louis Antoine De Saint-Just
#74. I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It's totally outrageous.
Charlie Munger
#75. We had a lot of people say, you guys are the most ineffective legislators in Olympia and your bills never go anywhere ... They can't say that anymore, can they?
Matt Shea
#76. Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.
Earl Warren
#77. When all the mysticism is stripped away, the people who comprise the government (the legislators, administrators, judges, and policemen), are guided by human interests, desires, beliefs, notions, and prejudices, just like other people. They have neither superhuman wisdom nor extraordinary virtue.
Hans F. Sennholz
#78. Representative government demands an ongoing conversation between legislators and constituents.
Alan Siegel
#79. Ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think is most reasonable to enact.
John Rawls
#80. 'Fairness' can be an important quality for legislators to consider when they are passing public policies. But it is a subjective standard. And it has no place among judges on a court - whose duty is to dispassionately judge a law's constitutionality.
Gary Bauer
#81. Governors and legislators wanted the hostiles held in check and the bandits hung, but they wanted it all to be done with the fewest possible men on the cheapest possible horses. It irritated Call and infuriated Augustus.
Larry McMurtry
#82. What is the harm of doing the right thing? What is the harm of doing our job as legislators and making sure we do not stick the entire bankruptcy community with these provisions that do not make any sense?
Russ Feingold
#83. Legislators have almost always been ignorant of the object of society, which is to unite families by a common interest.
Frederic Bastiat
#84. Treason is when legislators vote against homeland security measures because it goes against the wishes of their political or financial backers. Treason is the fact that, as a terrorist, you could still buy a gun in this country because the NRA lobby is so strong.
Bill Maher
#86. In reality, everybody in Congress is a stand-in for some kind of lobbyist. In many cases it's difficult to tell whether it's the companies that are lobbying the legislators or whether it's the other way around.
Matt Taibbi
#87. You can see the absence of women in governing bodies from Congress to state legislators, on corporate boards, in tenured positions in academia, and as forepeople in factories.
Gloria Steinem
#88. Southern racists were able to protect murderers only because their legislators exploited fears of centralized power.
Barney Frank
#89. In Maine, we are fortunate to have a Clean Elections system that allows legislators to turn down corporate special interest money. At the national level, Congress should follow Maine's example by empowering the voices of small donors.
Chellie Pingree
#90. Legislators and judges are necessarily exposed to all the temptations of money, fame, and power, to induce them to disregard justice between parties, and sell the rights, and violate the liberties of the people. Jurors, on the other hand, are exposed to none of these temptations.
Lysander Spooner
#91. Same sex marriage must be decided by the states, and by the people in the states, not by judges and not even by legislators, but by the people themselves.
Liz Cheney
#92. Congress has shortchanged not only foreign aid but foreign policy. A mistaken notion that diplomats are unimportant and hence undeserving of support grips conservative legislators, especially.
Anthony Lewis
#93. Free Speech in the College Community is a very timely book written by a dedicated scholar of the First Amendment. Challenging and readable it should be studied by all academicians, students, legislators and lawyers.
Nancy Kassebaum
#94. Several country towns, within my observation, have at least a dozen taverns. Here the time, the money, the health and the modesty, of most that are young and of many old, are wasted. Here diseases, vicious habits, bastards and legislators are frequently spawned.
John Adams
#95. When public spending in the form of transfer payments makes various services and benefits free of charge, work is discouraged. Yet it is precisely Social Security that legislators fear to cut.
Edmund Phelps
#96. A child can go only so far in life without potty training. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators.
Dave Barry
#97. In the formation of our constitution the wisdom of all ages is collected-the legislators of antiquity are consulted, as well as the opinions and interests of the millions who are concerned. It short, it is an empire of reason.
Noah Webster
#98. Our increasingly humanistic laws, courts and legislators are giving us a new morality. They tell us, as they strike down laws resting upon biblical foundations, that morality cannot be legislated, but what they offer is not only legislated morality, but salvation by law.
Rousas John Rushdoony
#99. Increasingly the individuals who want to live together are, or more precisely are becoming, the legislators of their own way of life, the judges of their own transgressions, the priests who absolve their own sins and the therapists who loosen the bonds of their own past.
Ulrich Beck Y Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim
#100. There is a different spelling between "rights" and "rites" - in other words, civic legislators and ecclesiastical councils have different responsibilities.
Otis Moss III
