“And unless you think there is a serious chance you’re going to jail, don’t listen to your lawyer.”

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.

The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.

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.

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.

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.

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

In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.

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.

Nothing in the world is as mobile as capital. It can move anywhere in the world instantaneously.

I smoke a cigar or two a day. I did have a brownie once. It made me sleepy.

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.

A leader can`t move a country that`s not ready. You can`t make the waves, but when you see them coming, you can help direct them.

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.

Well, many of us believe that excessive media concentration is a subject that ought to be addressed, and it is, of course, the intention of the majority party not to allow that to be discussed.

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.

They have to convert our agenda into something aggressive. Two guys wanting to be happy together are invading their marriages. Helping a kid who’s getting beaten up in school is promoting homosexuality. If you gave me a million dollars, I wouldn’t know how to promote homosexuality.

Jail and the streets go hand in hand. You can’t have one with out the other. They coincide.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, then throw my ass in jail.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill revolution, you can jail a liberator but you can’t jail liberation.