Words matter. These are the best Barney Frank Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I will tell you, I’m a lousy cook, but I think I’m a pretty good judge of a good meal.
The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left’s on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.
The regulation of medicine has been a State function.
Well, many of us believe that excessive media concentration is a subject that ought to be addressed, and it is, of course, the intention of the majority party not to allow that to be discussed.
It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people.
People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about.
It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.
Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions.
I hope we will not so characterize religious people as being so narrow and so biased towards people not of their own religion that they cannot even work with them in this common cause to which you say they are committed.
But here too it should be noted that the President’s approach was to first ask the repressive and brutal Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden to us, and only after that government refused to do that did we invade.
What’s troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process.
For most of my life, I have eaten to deal with stress.
For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.
Community action is as valuable a principle on the international level as it has been domestically.
The fact that they’re a congressionally chartered group should no more incline people to give to that group than the fact that it’s National Pickle Month should make them eat more pickles.
I filed the first gay rights bill in Massachusetts history in 1972 in the legislature, one of the first in the country.
I am not a great theologian. I know there is a theological concept called invincible ignorance in which a strong enough faith binds you to any facts to the contrary.
I have done a lot of work for affordable housing, rental housing. I understand the rap on me and other liberals is, oh, we push poor people into homeownership. And it’s exactly the opposite of the case. We were trying to prevent those kinds of bad loans.
As a liberal, I am morally obligated to be pragmatic. What good do I do poor people, elderly people, people who are being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation if I’m not realistic about accomplishing something.
It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.
There’s only one thing you can do in bankruptcy: break your word, break your deals. It allows you to say to the small businesses, who have been catering lunches for you, ‘Sorry, we’re not paying you.’ It allows you to go to the workers and say, ‘Sorry, we’re not paying you.’
It wasn’t until after I was reelected in 1982 that I thought of myself as a long-term member of Congress.
And I think there is too much bloviating around from politicians.
And unless you think there is a serious chance you’re going to jail, don’t listen to your lawyer.
I had always been interested in politics. I had assumed, for a variety of – well, for two reasons, being Jewish and being gay back in the late ’50s, early ’60s – that I would never be elected or anything, but I would participate as an activist.
Most people who are activists and are concerned about issues get their information from sources which reinforce their opinions and give them the facts that they want to hear.
Now, most of the time I’m going to agree with the Democrats and disagree with the Republicans.
When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.
While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.
