Top 70 Legislators Quotes

Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there’s no hierarchy.

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.

Efforts to support gay rights by GOP state legislators in several states are real and indicative of an increasing realization that expanding equal opportunity and freedom to gay Americans shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

Sometimes evil is in the form of a malignant clown, and sometimes evil is in the form of policy and legislators, and sometimes it’s a grinning death mask and it has something more viscerally terrifying about it.

As a district judge, I view my role quite differently than the role of legislators.

I was one of the founding members of State Legislators for Legal Immigration.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Sometimes, government officials and legislators disagree on policies or issues. Yet, we invariably want the best for Hong Kong people.

What Washington desperately needs now are citizen legislators that are dedicated to leading a free people and to maintain our God-given right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I think even pro-China legislators would not believe I’m really a CIA agent.

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.

In Illinois, where legislators are paid $45,000, plus as much as $10,000 for leadership work, about half are full-time politicians.

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.

When I first got asked to run for the state Senate, I was asked by a number of legislators I had worked with, and I thanked them and declined.

It is our duty as legislators to protect the success of our students as they pursue higher education.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The basic architecture of Dodd-Frank makes sense. At the same time, as a number of regulators and legislators have observed, the act was a complex effort that produced thousands of pages of rules.

For years, comprehensive tax reform has eluded legislators.

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.

Legislators should demand that we not go through the entire pension reform debate just to apply a band-aid when this patient needs a quadruple bypass.

Around the nation, lawmakers have drawn up their districts with such perverse precision and aversion to competition, that legislators rarely face competitive challenges.

When legislators do something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, there’s always the suspicion that they’re in somebody’s pocket.

My legislators devote most of their time to attend to people’s problems. I want the people to devote more time and contribute to the development of the state.

The important thing to understand about legislators is that there are dozens of competing interests and issues that occupy them. They are stretched thin.

At a time when special interest money is being showered on legislators in Washington, grassroots donors offer members of Congress a refreshing independence. The $25 and $50 donor is not looking for special favors. He or she is simply expecting their Congressman to go do the right thing.

People underestimate the impact they can have on the process through contact with legislators. By being part of an organized group in an area that you have an interest in, you can multiply the impact of your own ideas.

While the debate over banned books usually seems to happen just outside the gates of government, it takes on a new danger and urgency when legislators get involved. Their actions cause voices to be silenced both inside and outside the books. That’s un-American.

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.

It is fascinating to watch legislators turn away from their usual corporate grips when they hear the growing thunder of the people.

‘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.

I’ve been not only articulating the dissatisfaction with Albany, I’ve been acting on it. I’ve been very aggressive in bringing public integrity cases and public corruption cases and bringing cases against sitting legislators.

Democracy demands that judges confine themselves to a narrow sphere of influence – that is why the late Alexander Bickel called the judiciary the ‘Least Dangerous Branch.’ In a world governed by a proper conception of their role, judges don’t play at being legislators – they leave that job to our elected representatives.

Even for most of the GOP’s old-school legislators, there is dawning understanding that opposition to freedom to marry is on the wrong side of history and damaging to the long-term, and increasingly the short-term, prospects of the GOP, especially among independent-minded younger voters.

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.

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.

Only when legislators judge that the risk of continuing to support Trump outweighs the risk of abandoning him will they begin to jump ship.

I applaud Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison and the legislators in the Nevada State Senate who have introduced SB 26 to fight the BDS movement in Nevada.

Gay marriage passed in New York because four Republican legislators crossed party lines. They did it in part because they had true bipartisan financial support.

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.

We have to continue to raise awareness as the Voting Rights Caucus… make sure people call into their state legislators. Let us know that they’ve decided they weren’t going to vote because they heard it was a hassle.

The most effective executive branch officials try to help legislators develop explanations for the votes they are being asked to take.

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.

I have done things politically, and I’ve been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I’ve been doing it as a part-time job.

In the U.S., free speech and the press are protected by the First Amendment. It has a clarity unmatched by modern legislators and declares that ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or the press.’