Quotes About Legislatures

#1. In the last two years, the amount of legislation in the House of Representatives and state legislatures has been really unprecedented, that has focused on reproductive rights.

Sandra Fluke

#2. If laws acting upon private interests can not always be avoided, they should be confined within the narrowest limits, and left wherever possible to the legislatures of the States.

Martin Van Buren

#3. Truth and non-violence are not cloistered virtues but applicable as much in the forum and the legislatures as in the market place.

Mahatma Gandhi

#4. A local spirit will infallibly prevail much more in the members of Congress than a national spirit will prevail in the legislatures of the particular States.

James Madison

#5. The Federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular, to the state legislatures.

James Madison

#6. The media, the polls and our legislatures fortunately have short attention spans.

John Gutfreund

#7. Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way.

William Graham Sumner

#8. A market - any market - requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market.

Robert B. Reich

#9. I'd like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.

Gore Vidal

#10. Political union means transferring the prerogatives of national legislatures to the European parliament, which would then decide how to structure Europe's fiscal, banking, and monetary union.

Barry Eichengreen

#11. Legislatures represent people, not acres or trees.

Earl Warren

#12. Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men. Test-laws are useless and ineffectual, unjust and tyrannical.

Oliver Ellsworth

#13. I am not one of those who believe - broadly speaking - that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.

Jane Addams

#14. The appointment of senators by the state legislatures ... is recommended by the double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government, as must secure the authority of the former.

James Madison

#15. If fighting for the legislatures meant a sacrifice of truth and nonviolence, democracy would not be worth a moment's purchase.

Mahatma Gandhi

#16. It is of course true that any kind of judicial legislation is objectionable on the score of the limited interests which a Court can represent, yet there are wrongs which in fact legislatures cannot be brought to take an interest in, at least not until the Courts have acted.

Learned Hand

#17. And that's the mission of The Innocence Project in New York, is to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted, and also work from a policy angle with Congress and state legislatures to prevent future wrongful convictions.

John Grisham

#18. The history of successful cases, some of which are in this museum, illustrates that often the regulators and legislatures don't wake up until some plaintiff gets a lawyers and digs out the cover-ups and the incriminating information about a safety defect in an automobile or another product.

Ralph Nader

#19. They wish for a general government of unity, as they see that the local legislatures must naturally and necessarily tend to retard the general government.

Henry Knox

#20. I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.

Mark Twain

#21. Our work is before us. It cannot be passed to future legislatures and must not be passed to future generations. May we boldly seize the moment with singular unity. And may we build a Texas of unlimited possibility.

Rick Perry

#22. Many attempts had been made by colonial legislatures to cut off or to tax the importation of slaves.

Albert Bushnell Hart

#23. I consider the difference between a system founded on
the legislatures only, and one founded on the people, to be the true difference between a league or treaty and a constitution.

James Madison

#24. I see a trend here where the President seems to think his job is to count votes and then try to make a deal That's what we in legislatures do. Mr. Obama's job is to travel the country, fight for the values that he cares about.

Anthony Weiner

#25. For the same reason that the members of the State legislatures will be unlikely to attach themselves sufficiently to national objects, the members of the federal legislature will be likely to attach themselves too much to local objects.

James Madison

#26. I'm not the first to have raised these democratic concerns. Many have faulted the court for its lack of clarity in certain cases and many have criticized its recent lack of deference to decisions made by state legislatures and Congress.

Mike DeWine

#27. It's going to be very important that we as women's rights advocates are involved in redistricting of both the states legislatures and of the House of Representatives and that we not lose seats but we gain seats for talented women and our country, but we're lacking behind.

Eleanor Smeal

#28. The 'free market' is the product of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive departments, and courts.

Robert Reich

#29. The proper way to make policy changes is for you to convince your fellow citizens that there is a better policy outcome than the current one. And then in state legislatures, for those state legislatures to vote that change.

Ted Cruz

#30. Study the Constitution. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislatures, and enforced in courts of justice.

Abraham Lincoln

#31. Look not to legislatures and churches for your guidance, nor to any soulless incorporated bodies, but to inspirited or inspired ones.

Henry David Thoreau

#32. Do you think states' rights would have disappeared if state legislatures still elected our United States senators? Do you think our United States senators would be difficult to contact if they were named by our state legislatures?

Rob Woodall

#33. Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.

Diane Ravitch

#34. I am unable to conceive that the state legislatures which must feel so many motives to watch, and which possess so many means of counteracting the federal legislature, would fail either to detect or to defeat a conspiracy of the latter against the liberties of their common constituencies.

James Madison

#35. Unlike the United States Congress, which mostly forbids outside employment, state legislatures are generally composed of people with other careers.

Bill Dedman

#36. The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

Walt Whitman

#37. Truth and nonviolence are both the means and the end, and given the right type of men, the legislatures can be the means of achieving the concrete pursuit of truth and nonviolence.

Mahatma Gandhi

#38. Since 2010, when the GOP took control of many State legislatures, 205 anti-abortion laws have been enacted. This is more laws of this ilk than were passed in the prior decade.16 Since 2010 more than 50 abortion providers in 27 States have ended service, though not all were due to legislation.

David A. Grimes, M.D.

#39. 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

#40. It's unfortunate that there's such a disconnect between what's happening on our legislatures and what the public knows about, the consequences what that means for ourselves, our mothers and our wives.

Sandra Fluke

#41. As the church watches from the sidelines, the ungodly elect atheists and homosexuals to school boards and legislatures to enact policies and laws that destroy our Christian children and discriminate against Christian families.

Robert Simonds

#42. We are at a crossroads over how the federal government in Washington and state legislatures and city councils across the land allocate their financial resources. Which fork we take will say a lot about Americans and our values.

George McGovern

#43. Divorces led to bodies of men (called legislatures) protecting women collectively as other men (called husbands) failed to protect women individually.

Warren Farrell

#44. State governments generate less revenue in a recession. As state leaders struggle to make up for lost revenue, legislatures tend to cut funding for higher education. Colleges, in turn, answer these funding cuts with tuition hikes.

Arne Duncan

#45. Democrats in state legislatures are at their lowest level since the 1920s. President Obama has a can't-miss strategy to save the party in 2016. He's leaving.

Craig Ferguson

#46. Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools.

David Souter

#47. There still is a war on women in terms of politicians in Washington and the state legislatures trying to eliminate any rights we have fought to win and that the Supreme Court has afforded us.

Gloria Allred

#48. If the General Government should be left dependent on the State Legislatures, it would be happy for us if we had never met in this room.

John Dickinson

#49. Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.

Ken Thompson

#50. The frame of mind in the local legislatures seems to be exerted to prevent the federal constitution from having any good effect.

Henry Knox