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.
BARNEY FRANKBut 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.
More Barney Frank Quotes
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I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the Army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.
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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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If people knew of ethics violations, they should have sent them to the Ethics Committee. If you think there was serious ethics violation that ought to be looked at, you don’t hold it back for retaliatory purposes.
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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 not aware of any specific provision that mandates any tightening of lending to small business other than a requirement that people who lend and then sell that loan be prepared to take a part of the risk. And I’m proud of that.
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They appear to have become so attached to their outrage that they are even more outraged that they won’t be able to be outraged anymore.
BARNEY FRANK -
The best humor is offered up to you by the stupidity of your opponents.
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But it is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency.
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The rights of the people who have done terrible things are hard to defend. You have to keep pointing out, the question is the process to determine whether they’ve done the terrible things.
BARNEY FRANK -
Donald Trump has done more for getting people to understand the importance of public policy that respond to public needs in an affirmative way than anything we could have done on our own.
BARNEY FRANK -
For the trustees to turn away from the entirely reasonable request of the students that a hearing-impaired individual be made president of the college is a very unfortunate expression of insensitivity.
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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.
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Regarding homophobia in general, the good news is that there is a lot less of it than there used to be. The bad news is that it ever existed in the first place, and the worse news is that it remains far stronger than is healthy for a society dedicated in theory to equality under the law.
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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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Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons, and liberals who supported them.
BARNEY FRANK