I should have voted for the first Iraq war. George Bush did that one very well. I had been skeptical. I was afraid that George Bush was going to treat the first Iraq war the way his son treated the second.
BARNEY FRANKThe fact that theyre a congressionally chartered group should no more incline people to give to that group than the fact that its National Pickle Month should make them eat more pickles.
More Barney Frank Quotes
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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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In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.
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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.
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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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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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For most of my life, I have eaten to deal with stress.
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I think there was an absolute, deep gap between consensual relations between adults, which people may like or dislike, and people who physically impose themselves on children or misuse their authority to impose on children.
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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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In the debate between those who believe in essentially unregulated markets and others who hold that reasonable regulation diminishes market excesses without inhibiting their basic function, the subprime situation unfortunately provides ammunition for the latter view.
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What’s troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process.
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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.
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Ridicule is about the most powerful weapon possible.
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The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.
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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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The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.
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We don’t get ourselves dry cleaned.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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If Bob Barr (conservative republican congressman from Georgia) caught on fire and I was holding a bucket of water, it would be great act of discipline to pour it on him. I would do it, but I’d hate myself in the morning.
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Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.
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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 on those occasions when I do strongly disagree with the Democrats and I don’t say anything, I think I forfeit my right to have people pay attention to me when I say the things that I don’t like about what Republicans are saying.
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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.
BARNEY FRANK