Paul Light Quotes (41 Quotes)

Habitat (for Humanity) will build you a house, and it will build 500 other houses. It won't build 10,000 houses.

You end up with people like Mike Brown who have absolutely no qualification for office, but have plenty of loyalty and ideological zealousness.

The paradox of this vice president is the things that made him so valuable in the beginning and so important to the president - his willingness to take the lead and be a strong visible advocate on some issues - have come back to haunt him. It's almost like everything that's bad in the administration has come back to stick to Dick Cheney .

They've been getting slower and slower, and the vacancy rates have been climbing.

Cheney becomes a bit of an albatross except with the base, where he's a real rock star, ... It'll be less possible for him to make campaign trips because this issue will dog him.

The president is less and less influential, and his approval numbers are still low. A lot of these members of Congress are saying, 'I need to stand up on my own'.

They've already surpassed their available resources. That's a warning sign that 2 billion figure is going to be hard to reach, ... It is not like Sept. 11, in the sense that there's this great reservoir of continued support.

The problem there is if you want to give direction to the bureaucracy to stop doing certain things or to start doing new things, you've got to have that neck in place to transfer the signals from the brain -- the president and the cabinet -- down to the career layer and the body.

The real trick he faces is that this is a different war than any we've ever faced, and domestic concerns are clearly rising.

There may be some pattern here that has to do with the fact that Bush has spent a lot of time in New Jersey and New York dealing with Sept. 11, ... And Bush is the kind of president who tends to appoint people that he knows and likes.

We're not in a 'what' crisis, we are in a 'how' crisis,

There is a profession of disaster preparedness. It is a well-developed profession. Witt came out of that community. Witt had a very good Rolodex, and at the end of the day, that's really important.

Our research shows that Americans are over-confident in the ability of government to respond. But there are many highly probable scenarios that involve an almost complete breakdown of social order. Katrina showed us that all those structures we depend on can be swept away.

These scandals don't have very much impact on public opinion because opinion couldn't be much worse. They just reinforce what the public already believes.

This is a failure of planning, a failure of anticipation. People in key government agencies at all levels didn't do their jobs, they weren't ready to take the help.

You go to the FBI where they investigate the answers to your forms, there are only so many FBI agents available to do that. Then you go to the office of government ethics, where they clear your financial disclosure and cure any conflicts of interest you might have,

It's a rare moment when you get a housecleaning like this. It could presage a strong turnaround for an agency that's been adrift for years if not decades.

If you don't believe what the president believes or more generally what the White House believes, you're not going to get a second look and that narrows the pool to a very small number of people,

The basic question is, will the public listen to the government in the future, and that's a critically important question. It is entirely possible this could have a significant impact on the public's willingness to listen to their government, police, fire and charity officials in the event of another catastrophe in another city.

We could do twice as good a job with half as many appointees.

There are a number of offices where you just can't afford a steep learning curve and you need somebody who is able to move quickly and make sharp policy decisions.

We are having generational change on the court and will continue to have it over the next five to 10 years.

The way to reassure your own supporters is to talk constantly about results toward your mission.

I think that is starting to show here now in jobs where the administration would like to have some quality and would like to have some expertise.

If you say that only conservative Republicans need apply, then you have diminished the pool of potential candidates significantly,

Then you go up to Capitol Hill for Senate confirmation. All of these choke points can only handle so many names at a time.

It's hugely embarrassing for the sector. I don't believe there is any malfeasance here. But . . . the notion that the Red Cross simply cannot track where the money is going feeds into this growing concern that charities cannot be trusted to spend their money wisely.

If you were a Democrat, you'd probably get hammered for it. There's an irony there. You've got a Republican president overseeing the creation of a large, new department. But I don't think he'll get criticized for it.

These guys kind of have a deer-in-the headlights look they haven't been through this kind of thing and it shows. I'm afraid FEMA has gone backwards in time to the old era of a more traditional campaign-loyalty position.

You can go through it and select the position and the title that you might like to have, like the associate deputy under secretary of interior.

He's surrounded by people who agree with him.

He's a survivor, that's for sure, ... He was intimately involved with the decision that dumped Nelson Rockefeller from the ticket under President Ford, and he ought to be thinking a little about that these days. I don't think he's anywhere near that kind of crisis, but Cheney's greatest vulnerability is hubris.

The Office of Personnel Management's Plum Book, published at the start of each presidential Administration, shows that there are more than 3,000 positions a President can fill without consideration for civil service rules. And Bush has gone further than most Presidents to put political stalwarts in some of the most important government jobs you've never heard of, and to give them genuine power over the bureaucracy. These folks are really good at using the instruments of government to promote the President's political agenda, ... And I think that takes you well into the gray zone where few Presidents have dared to go in the past. It's the coordination and centralization that's important here.

He's become such a lightning rod. Much of the public blames him for everything that's gone wrong in the Bush administration.

My experience is that young people will put up with a low salary and almost self-finance for the chance to learn something new and make a difference.

What were they thinking You know a hurricane's going to knock down cell phone towers,

Sacking the president isn't the panacea for what ails the Red Cross.

There's a general sense that the charitable sector has the touch needed, a better feel for the communities affected.

The scandal isn't greed in the nonprofit sector. The scandal is under-investment in our own organizations. We're not ready to respond to the uncertainties out there.

These things become symptoms of a broader disquiet with Cheney.

My reading of the tea leaves is that they've put Cheney out to defend himself, and if he succeeds, fine, and if he doesn't, fine, but that he's really on his own now, isolated by the departure of his chief of staff, Scooter Libby.