Barney Frank Quotes (58 Quotes)

The time has come to undo some of those tax breaks,

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.

not diluting the marriage between a man and a woman.

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.

I hope the regulators understand by now there is, I think, unanimity on this committee that they should experiment, they should be flexible, they should do everything reasonable to get money into people's hands because people need money to eat and to live and because that's the way we're going to bring the economy back,

It is a terrible allocation of scarce resources, ... The time has come to de-emphasize the manned space program.

Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about.

He couldn't stop taking blame. He was a basket case and couldn't keep it together.

Community action is as valuable a principle on the international level as it has been domestically.

And I think there is too much bloviating around from politicians.

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.

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.

We are not taking anybody's pay or even setting any limits.

I think Gore was over-reacting in some ways to the criticism that Clinton hadn't pushed hard enough.

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.

What's troubling is that the Republicans to defend Mr. DeLay are weakening the ethics process.

Now, most of the time I'm going to agree with the Democrats and disagree with the Republicans.

It was just about the most heartless thing I have ever seen a government do that did not involve absolute loss of life.

This application is clearly of sufficient importance to require that it be made by the members of the FDIC Board itself and only by a full Board without vacancies.

We will be seeking to knock out that part that says groups that engage in voter-registration and get-out-the-vote activities are not eligible.

It is true that the results of the American intervention in Afghanistan will certainly be a far more democratic Afghanistan, and I welcome that.

When I spoke to him, the first thing I did was tease him, saying I thought this was a ploy because he wants to run for Congress. It's not anything that's fun to do, sharing with people intimate things about himself, but it's important and unimportant at the same time. It's something important for him to be honest with people, but it doesn't affect how he does his job.

I think they're making a mistake, not just because it's expensive but because a hotel just isn't a good place to live,

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.

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.

You showed your credentials by being able to talk about all this detail, but a lot of people - including Democrats - got sucked into it. They learned the lingo, but they forgot it had no relation to reality. It was like critics of 'The Three Stooges' debating the right way to squirt seltzer up your nose. They forgot that the whole thing was a little silly.

The Clinton tax increase - which was an increase in taxes primarily on upper-income people - not only made the tax code more nearly progressive, it preceded one of the most productive economic periods in American life.

This is very revealing of the hypocrisy of the NRA, ... They would have the second amendment of the Constitution amended so it would also read 'a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of the people, no housing authority shall buy safe guns.'

My reading is that there was concern in the financial community that with the absence of Greenspan, we crazy politicians will no longer respect the independence of the Fed. Bush's going there today, quite sensibly, was an indication that the president intends to continue to defer to the Fed on monetary policy.

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.

I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.

Today, many people take for granted the notion that people whose lives are going to be very heavily affected by public policies should have a say in how they are formulated and carried out.

Martin Luther King said, and it is sadly still true, that one of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship.

There's a lot to be said for not displacing people.

The losers, if we do not re-enact terrorism risk insurance, are people who want to build in those cities seen as potential targets of terrorism. They would not be able to get loans.

I would say this What I'm basically saying here is the federal government cannot and should not be the nanny of the states in everything here.

For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.

People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

The fact that they're a congressionally chartered group should no more incline people to give to that group than the fact that it's National Pickle Month should make them eat more pickles.

It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.

This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system and it's expensive to boot.

And it is not our job to be the high court of appeals that overrules what courts do, state courts and federal courts now, in a particular case.

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.

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.

It is a very bad idea for the United States government to spend tens of billions of dollars to send people to Mars and to the moon,

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.

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.

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.

It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people.