Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn’t have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.
BARNEY FRANKThere is a correlation between people who attack same-sex marriage and have difficulty maintaining their own.
More Barney Frank Quotes
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NATO was a wonderful idea. It was formed in 1949. We are as far away from NATO as NATO was when it was done in time from the presidency of Grover Cleveland.
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I have this fear that one day there’s going to be a fire in the Senate and there are only going to be 57 senators there and they’ll all die because they won’t have 60 votes to allow themselves to leave the building.
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There is a correlation between people who attack same-sex marriage and have difficulty maintaining their own.
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Serving in Congress is like having a second shot at high school.
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Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.
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But when others suggested that the poor should not simply be the objects of these programs but also the subjects – that they should be actively involved in shaping the programs, making decisions about how to spend the money etc. – some of the previous supporters reconsidered.
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In a free society, a large degree of human activity is none of the government’s business. We should make criminal what’s going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.
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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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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.
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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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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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Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there’s no hierarchy.
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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.
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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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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.
BARNEY FRANK