Legislators Quotes

“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”

“Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.”

“An individual who delights at all in the beauty of language does well to avoid becoming an attorney or a legislator.”

“If life was fair ... one third of the people would comprise of judges and lawyers ... one third of police and prison officials ... and one third of legislators ... and one third more to make the other three thirds make any sense at all .... Thank goodness for no fair.”

“There is an unnatural unfitness in an aristocracy to be legislators for a nation. Their ideas of distributive justice are corrupted at the very source. They begin life trampling on all their younger brothers and sisters, and relations of every kind, and are taught and educated so to do. With what ideas of justice or honor can that man enter a house of legislation, who absorbs in his own person the inheritance of a whole family of children, or metes out some pitiful portion with the insolence of a gift?”

“I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reforms. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?”

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

“I was one of the founding members of State Legislators for Legal Immigration.”

“Legislators are interested in their pet projects, getting re-elected, and popularity contests.”

“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”