Top 111 Entitlement Quotes

For the past two years, President Obama has promised our children the moon, stars, rainbows, unicorns and universal health care for all. But the White House Santa’s cradle-to-grave entitlement mandates are a spectacularly predictable bust.

Men feel they have a sense of power and entitlement over women.

In order to truly get deficit spending and federal debt under control, the Trump administration is going to have to eventually address entitlement reform. If not, Trump will not only become part of the Washington status quo on the issue, but will leave burdensome and expensive problems for future generations.

The thing that upsets me the most is the entitlement of people that will stand with a flag and say to some other people that they need to go back to where they came from. When, in fact, they also would need to go back to where they came from, because you need to go all the way back to the beginning.

Let’s be honest about this; the liberal agenda with failed stimulus plans and government entitlement programs is crippling our economy and our quality of life.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

Entitlement is the opposite of enchantment.

My parents gave me a strong sense of entitlement. And I use that in a very good way.

I don’t want my children to have any kind of ego or entitlement because of what I do. I want them to be good people, and we fight every day so that they’ll be that way.

I don’t want to be obnoxious with my ambition or sound like I expect any sort of entitlement here. Hollywood is not in the business of humoring people.

The central question is whether Medicare and Medicaid should remain entitlement programs guaranteeing a certain amount of care, as Democrats believe, or become defined contribution programs in which federal spending is capped, as Republicans suggest.

I hate the unfairness of injustice. Anybody who thinks they are better than others or ‘chosen’ or feel they have an entitlement… be it through monarchy, government or money. I think we are all born the same. We are entitled to an equal shot at life.

I have no problem with military and entitlement reform, lower costs raise freedom.

We as Republicans understand that we have got to protect these… entitlement programs – these entitlement programs for our seniors today. And we have to sit down and have a discussion. We need more ideas on the table.

I don’t know so much about my boys, but my girls, they all work with me. They know how to work. My daughters know it’s not done till it’s done, even if it’s three or four in the morning. I don’t want them to grow up with entitlement.

I opposed the Medicare prescription drug entitlement. I opposed the Wall Street bailout. I opposed the stimulus bill.

Advocacy groups like Families U.S.A. imagine that once Medicaid becomes a middle-class entitlement, political pressure from middle-class workers will force politicians to address these problems by funneling more taxpayer dollars into this flawed program. President Barack Obama’s health plan follows this logic.

Democrats cannot win elections without capturing the votes of independent-minded swing voters. And that is where writing off the Tea Party as a bunch of racist kooks becomes self-destructive. The Tea Party outrage over health-care reform, deficit spending and entitlements run amok is no fringe concern.

It’s amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public – this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting.

I don’t see that anyone owes me anything for my service. I don’t feel any sense of entitlement.

I don’t have a sense of entitlement or that I deserve this. You’d be surprised at the lack of competition between nominees – I think a lot of it’s imposed from the outside. Can I have my champagne now?

Too many people on the Left think that, when you move a chunk of money away from people for entitlements, that the money magically reappears and that discretionary spending will be unaffected.

It’s clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we’ve created in the structure of the system.

The entitlement state has driven us into insolvency.

The conservative vision regards politics more as a matter of gratitude than entitlement – duty over rights. We have inherited so much: a wonderful country, a culture of freedom and abundance, even our life itself, earned through no effort of our own but bequeathed as a gift from our forefathers.

Actors devote a lot of our time and energy to the work that we do, but there shouldn’t come a sense of entitlement from fans that we owe them every second of our lives.

No major entitlement, once it has been implemented, has ever been unwound.

I think that retiring the baby boomers is going to be one of the great challenges in America, that you cannot make fiscal sense out of the future of our children without taking on entitlements.

I believe there are several conservative democrats who are prepared to join Republicans in opposition to measures that propose new entitlements and reparations.

Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process… is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something’s getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlement over them.

It was just the DNA of my family. Giving back didn’t feel like an entitlement; it was an obligation.

People who take more than their share usually feel an inflated sense of entitlement.

While the Left seems obsessed with increasing taxes and spending even more money, conservatives have focused more heavily on the need for spending restraint and entitlement reform – primarily to preserve and protect the future of the Medicare program. Overlooked in all of this is the future of Medicaid.

Congress needs strong parties, but it also needs the capacity to deal with budget and entitlement challenges that are likely beyond the reach of pure partisan exertion.

Conversely, conservatives assume that humans are fundamentally lazy and prone to immorality. In this view, the entitlement system coddles and rewards laziness. This cynicism spills over into their view of government and government ‘bureaucrats.’ It also spills over into their political tactics.

When a parent shows up with an attitude of entitlement, understand that under it is a boatload of anxiety.

GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren’t even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.

I’d love to see lower spending levels, and in absence of lower spending levels, I’d love to see us reallocate where some of that spending is and really address the entitlements that continue growing.

The future of America is not an entitlement. We have been given a treasure chest of gifts and opportunities, but some people are being left behind, and success is not sustainable unless it is shared.

All Democrats are not entitlement people. These are the people who are going to suffer the cost of Obama health care. These are the people who are suffering because there’re no jobs.

We are witnessing a very slow and painful cultural shift. Some male gamers with a deep sense of entitlement are terrified of change. They believe games should continue to cater exclusively to young heterosexual men with ever more extreme virtual power fantasies.

The need to change our country’s fiscal trajectory, including reforming entitlement programs, is an unassailable reality that will define our time.

I think that all areas of the budget have to be scrubbed. Clearly the entitlement issues have to be reformed and that’s an issue that’s going to require I think some strong bipartisan cooperation and leadership.

Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.

What props up biological research, at least in the vaunted U.S. of A., involves a situation so deeply imbued with entitlement mentality that it has sunk into institutional corruption.

What I’d like to do is be able to work with Democrats to reform current entitlement programs for future generations, grandfathering all the grandparents.

People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.

We have a lot of entitlement programs in this country, and we’ve seen how much they cost us on the back end when people don’t have the education they need. I say let’s make this investment on the front end. I think it’ll be better for the individual and better for our state in the long term.

The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.

We live in the age of entitlement, as opposed to enlightenment.

If we are ever going to rescue our nation from selfish entitlement, political correctness, and collectivism, we must start sending citizen-statesman warriors to fight for us in Washington, and I believe Col. Maness will do just that.

Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter.

We don’t have entitlements as part of our family heritage. If you want nice things in life, if you want to get ahead, you have to earn it.

When you’re talking about long-term deficit reduction, $4 trillion worth, entitlement reform needs to be part of it.

Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement.

Trillions of dollars in out-of-control entitlement spending cannot be remedied by cuts in NASA, or even in the entire discretionary budget, defense included. Rather, the financial bleeding needs to be staunched where the hole is and nowhere else.

A government subsidized economic recovery, is not an economic recovery – it’s an entitlement state.

Sometimes people take it for granted that they had success, especially nowadays when you have instant stardom. A lot of people feel entitlement and nobody is entitled to anything.

I feel like rock stars feel a sense of entitlement, whereas I just feel a sense of good fortune.

You’ve got to either say you’re going to cut taxes and find some spending cuts. I think we ought to reform long-term entitlement spending in the country, but you can’t out of one side of your mouth say, ‘Yes, we’re for tax cuts, we’re for spending discipline, and we’re for bringing down the debt.’

The decision to marry is every woman’s entitlement, irrespective of her age.

I am going to give the American people a huge helping of unbridled truth: that we can’t continue to spend what we are spending, that we can’t avoid entitlement reform because we are afraid of third rail politics.

The two pillars of feminism are narcissism and entitlement.

Ingenious prisoners have successfully claimed a range of novel entitlements, from fertility treatment to a right to keep twigs in their cells to wave as wands in pagan rituals.

Republicans’ focus on defunding or scaling back Obamacare – an unpopular entitlement program – rather than entitlements generally, namely Social Security and Medicare, has raised questions about their true objective. But critics forget that spending is fungible.

Medicaid is essentially bankrupt, Medicare is essentially bankrupt, why the heck would we give the federal government another entitlement program to manage?

There should not be an entitlement that because you get paid the most money, that you should finish every game. But if you don’t do it, then the agents are going to call, and the players are going to mope, and so you negotiate that. It’s a compromise as a coach.

Every year the Federal Government wastes billions of dollars as a result of overpayments of government agencies, misuse of government credit cards, abuse of the Federal entitlement programs, and the mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy.

Bill Clinton has done some incredibly reckless, irresponsible things as president. But his campaign to expand Medicare entitlements has to rank among the worst.

Childhood ought to have at least a few entitlements that aren’t entangled with utilitarian considerations. One of them should be the right to a degree of unencumbered satisfaction in the sheer delight and goodness of existence in itself.

Everything Republicans once claimed to advocate – entitlement reform, free trade, standing up to dictators, encouraging the march of freedom around the world – turns out to be negotiable and reversible, depending on Donald Trump’s whims and the furies of his base.

Far too many well-connected businesses are feeding at the federal trough. By addressing corporate welfare as well as other forms of welfare, we would add a whole new level of understanding to the notion of entitlement reform.

Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Why is it that the very people who have fought so hard and so long for the simple entitlement to love whom they choose to love are the very ones denied that right by those who routinely take their vows for granted?

By finding waste and abuse in entitlement programs, and eliminating it, we can ensure that the funds that are put into these programs go to the people that need them the most.

In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

Analysts may be correct that the presidential election won’t primarily turn on entitlements reform, but by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney can, contrary to conventional wisdom, make it a winning issue and lay the foundation for a reform mandate when he wins.

Our best days are in front of us. We can reform those entitlements, we can change that corporate tax code and lower it. We can put America back on track on a growth level and a growth rate that we’ve never seen in the history of this country.

Such is the sense of entitlement of Boris Johnson and his establishment class – they believe they can break the law without the consequences meeting ordinary people.

Living with very limited expectations is a much more immediate way of living. You really do just make the best of everything you have. I guess kids have that ability; they wait in joyful anticipation of something rather than that sense of entitlement.

It is true that, when an entitlement begins to be enjoyed by people, they like to keep it.

We Nigerians must reclaim our sovereignty, our civic entitlements.

Entitlement is just the grossest kind of human behavior.

Join America taught English, an understanding of the U.S. Constitution, that the Bill of Rights is the ultimate insurance policy for a citizen, and that being a citizen is not an entitlement. And we also taught a bit of capitalism.

Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it.

I’ve seen a lot of actors in a lot of different stages of their careers, and I’ve seen it come and go. People get a sense of entitlement from it. And that’s when it starts getting you in trouble.

Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle.

Americans have a choice to make: higher taxes or fewer health care entitlements. We’ll probably have to choose both. But as each of us marches toward death, we can’t pretend we can have all the health care we need, paid for by taxing Bill Gates a little more.

The government should move towards supporting aspirations and not entitlement. Subsidies supporting non-productive growth should be reduced.

I don’t think anybody should be expanding Medicaid. I think it’s a mistake to create new and more expensive entitlement programs when we can’t afford the ones we’ve got today. We’ve got to stop this culture of government dependence.

I am the most successful unsuccessful actor in New York. And I guess with that, maybe apparent only to myself, there started to be a very subtle but unmistakable whiff of entitlement, bitterness, jealousy. I was not respecting the work.

I react very badly when mediocrity throws a tantrum of entitlement.

When President George W. Bush attempted to reform Social Security, that proposal was more unpopular with Americans than the Iraq war. People love their entitlements.

President Obama has ignored or dismissed proposals that would address our anti-competitive tax code and unsustainable trajectory of federal debt – including his own bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform – and submitted no plan for entitlement reform.

Obamacare has driven entitlement spending up much faster than expected.

I think that whether you’re on the right or on the left as an economist or as a policy maker, every serious analyst I know agrees that at some point you have to deal with entitlements.

Conservatism is a hard choice for a society that has become accustomed to big government and big entitlements promoted by liberals.

The self was a very strange concept to me until I came to America, and my child was born with that entitlement, and that just thrilled me.

So let me be clear, Collective bargaining isn’t a right, it is an expensive entitlement. Once and for all, we are giving the taxpayers a voice in this debate. We put the power back in the hands of the people.

Letting non-citizens vote jeopardizes our principles as a nation. They vote only for entitlement, not for their own responsibility as citizens.

When you talk about entitlement programs, it’s not just about – it’s not about cutting those programs. It is about saving those programs. Those programs are on a path of fiscal unsustainability.

Every team can have a shot at the title, and we’re seeing all of them as a potential threat. There’s absolutely no feeling of entitlement to be at the front.

Private education can give you confidence, which is marvellous; a sense of entitlement isn’t.

And in terms of entitlement reforms, we have to save them from themselves, because if we don’t reform social security and we don’t reform Medicare, they’re going to actually implode.

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

National sovereignty is an obligation as well as an entitlement. A government that will not perform the role of a government forfeits the rights of a government.

I am afraid of privilege, of ease, of entitlement.

Since FDR’s New Deal, corporations and wealthy families have been non-stop finding new ways to get tax breaks, deregulation and entitlements from the government.

Success in the United States is not an entitlement in China. You have to go there and earn it, and earn it the right way.

I’d propose that each central-city child should have an entitlement from the state to attend any school in the metropolitan area outside his own district – with per pupil funds going with him.