Ridicule is about the most powerful weapon possible.
BARNEY FRANKWe don’t get ourselves dry cleaned.
More Barney Frank Quotes
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People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
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In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.
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I had always been interested in politics. I had assumed – 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.
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I am very proud of the role I played in getting legal equality for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and in helping get rid of the prejudice by being visible about it, helping to block the conviction of Bill Clinton of impeachment.
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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.
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And unless you think there is a serious chance you’re going to jail, don’t listen to your lawyer.
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We all have the right to call each other names. Rudeness is a deeply held constitutional value.
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When I was here there was still a requirement that students had to swim 50 yards to graduate…because Harry Elkins Widener had drowned with the sinking of the Titanic. And it made me very grateful at the time that he had not gone down in a plane crash.
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The public is ready now for a safety net for the middle class, something not just for the poor, but for everyone who will need help, from time to time, in order to own a home, educate their kids, keep themselves healthy or have something to retire on.
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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.
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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.
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There was a degree of interventionism in American foreign policy, the notion that we must be the superpower and we have to intervene everywhere, that I think makes no sense.
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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.
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I smoke a cigar or two a day. I did have a brownie once. It made me sleepy.
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The issue is not that morals be applied to public policy, it’s that conservatives bring public policy to spheres of our lives where it should not enter.
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I have been mislabeled as a big advocate of low-income home ownership over rental.
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The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.
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Bush senior used to say that we have more will than wallet. So he urged the country to attack poverty with a thousand points of light, none of which could be eaten.
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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.
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I wouldn’t want [gay marriage] to go to the United States Supreme Court now because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has too many votes on this current court.
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I do not believe that the federal government should treat adults who choose to smoke marijuana as criminals.
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Ronald Reagan got a lot of democrats. I wish he hadn`t. I got to Congress with Reagan coming to the Whitehouse. The Reagan Program, a very radical one, a very drastic one passed because he had a lot of democrats. He worked at it personally and also because Reagan retained a popularity.
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Moderate Republicans are reverse Houdinis. They tie themselves up in knots and then tell you they can’t do anything because they’re tied up in knots.
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Take free speech: most of the tough cases on free speech involve very unpleasant people saying very obnoxious things.
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These two entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.
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[Democrats] are trying on every front to increase the role of government.
BARNEY FRANK