Congressmen Quotes & Sayings

What do we have for veterans? Government-run health care. I understand that. Congressmen and senators ... they get five choices of government-run health care. Why should a congressman and senator get anything more than a regular citizen does? Why are they privileged and the rest of us aren't? — Jesse Ventura

We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Congresswomen are congresswomen - you are, sorry. And for women who want to be congressmen, there's a screw loose in their head. I'm proud of being a woman. I think 'congresswoman' is the appropriate term, and 'Madame chair' is just fine with me. — Linda Sanchez

I want to thank you for coming to the White House to give me an opportunity to urge you to work with these five senators and three congressmen, to work hard to get this trade promotion authority moving. The power that be, well most of the power that be, sits right here. — George W. Bush

I can't remember the exact quote but when I used to trade and Mr. Volcker was Fed chairman, he said something like 'gold is my enemy, I'm always watching what gold is doing', we need to think why he made a statement like that. If you're a central banker or one of the congressmen or senators, watch what gold is doing because this is a no-confidence vote in fiscal and dollar policy. — Rick Santelli

There can be no complete and permanent reform of the civil service until public opinion emancipates congressmen from all control and influence over government patronage. Legislation is required to establish the reform. No proper legislation is to be expected as long as members of Congress are engaged in procuring offices for their constituents. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damages morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hung — Abraham Lincoln

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

My dad was one of only four congressmen who supported Reagan. — Rand Paul

I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional.
We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy.
They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about.
It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it. — Thomas Sowell

We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary. We don't feel that in 1964, living in a country that is supposedly based upon freedom, and supposedly the leader of the free world, we don't think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a President from Texas in Washington, D.C., to make up their minds that our people are due now some degree of civil rights. No, we want it now or we don't think anybody should have it. — Malcolm X

If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don't need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives. — Will Rogers

We have the best congressmen that money can buy. — Jo Ann Dearing

President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen. — Jimmy Fallon

Lyndon Johnson. The junior congressman saw two things that no one else saw. The first was a possible connection between two groups that had previously had no link: conservative Texas oilmen and contractors - most notably his financial backer, Herman Brown, of Brown & Root - who needed federal contracts and tax breaks and were willing to spend money, a lot of money, to get them; and the scores of northern, liberal congressmen, running for re-election, who needed money for their campaigns. The second was that he could become that link. — Robert A. Caro

Jack Abramoff is going to testify against some of the other weasels in Congress. A lobbyist testifying against congressmen? How many Bibles are going to burst into flames in that courtroom? — Jay Leno

I've done a whole lot of things. I've had the pleasure of introducing two presidents, several senators and congressmen. — Roy Acuff

I very, very much want to be involved in helping those senators, congressmen, and women who support the principles that made America great. — Foster Friess

The tax code will never be simplified in our lifetime because it's not about taxes; it's about congressmen distributing the pork. — Rita Mae Brown

In Washington, one man could do what ten of them do. There could be only a quarter or a third as many congressmen or senators, and we would pick better ones then. But it's the system that we have always used, and there is no use getting all overcome with perspiration over it. Things kinder run themselves, anyhow. — Will Rogers

Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in Christ. American democracy would not have lasted almost 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights. The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism. — Yuval Noah Harari

I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag , whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people , and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities. — Alan Watts

Police in Washington D.C. are now using cameras to catch drivers who go through red lights. Many congressmen this week opposed the use of the red light cameras incorrectly assuming they were being used for surveillance at local brothels. — Dennis Miller

To many Congressmen and Senators right now, there's a ceaseless antagonism toward Hollywood because politically, it is high-reward and low-risk. So when you can't do anything about poverty or the budget deficit, and you can't deal with Bosnia or the possibility of nuclear explosions in Russia, what do you do? You bash Hollywood and get on the front pages. — Jack Valenti

There are congressmen in our congregation, judges, federal reserve governors. And there are also people who are homeless and some who are mentally ill. To be able to talk to each of those people is something that I've had to learn how to do over the years. — James Green Somerville

The first thing I want to make clear is that this violence, this terrorism, is not cultural. It isn't
integral either to Arab or Muslim culture. I've done too many briefings for senators and congressmen who think that all 'towelheads' carry a pistol and a grenade. If you can't see beyond this stereotype, then we might as well stop now. — Steven Gould

Deficits, as I've often said, aren't caused by too little taxing, they are caused by too much spending. Presidents don't create deficits, Congress does. Presidents can't appropriate a dollar of taxpayers' money; only congressmen can - and Congress is susceptible to all sorts of influences that have nothing to do with good government. — Ronald Reagan

A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it's that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen. — Lawrence Lessig

The real estate interests and banks are in a kind of symbiosis. They're the largest-growing part of the economy. This is the sector that backs the political campaigns of senators, presidents and congressmen, and they use this leverage to make sure that their people dominate the Federal Reserve, Treasury and the federal housing agencies. — Michael Hudson

Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you ... increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of educating our future presidents, senators and congressmen. — Susan B. Anthony

These were in the days before anybody thought to criticize Congressmen, let alone first ladies, for making money on speeches. So Eleanor raked in quite a bit of cash that she may have put, for all I know, to good uses, or maybe not. I just don't know. But I don't think she was any great literary breakthrough. — William A. Rusher

Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects. — Jack McDevitt

You have so mamy different personas. The one i meet in Dublin, the one who speaks on the phone.
There are a few other bonos: the one who writes in the morning, the one who performs in front of crowds, the one who addresses U.S congressmen, and of course the one who now sits on the board of elevation partners.
Of course the same person shelters all those different roles.
All art is an attempt to identify yourself. You try out many different characters on the way to finding the one that most fits you, and therefore is you. I mean, all children do. I'm adolescence, you see them trying out different sides of their personality. So I'm just exploring and trying to find out what I'm capable of. — Michka Assayas

It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that. — Mark Twain

Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory ... : 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too. — E.L. Doctorow

The difference between congressmen and drunken sailors is that drunken sailors are spending their own money. — Tom Feeney

We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games. — Louise Erickson

There's nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn't recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. — Frank Rich

Sometimes," he [Congressmen John Lewis] said, "you have to ask for something that you know you may not get. And still you have to ask for it. It's still worth fighting for and, even if you don't believe that you will see it in your lifetime, you have got to hold it up so that the generation that comes next will take it from your hands and, in their own time, see it as a goal worth fighting for again. — Jonathan Kozol

In general, presidents and congressmen have very limited power to do good for the economy and awesome power to do bad. The best good thing that politicians can do for the economy is to stop doing bad. In part, this can be achieved through reducing taxes and economic regulation, and staying out of our lives. — Walter E. Williams

The most noticeable weakness of Congressmen is their timidity. They fear the use to be made of their "record." They are afraid ofmaking enemies. They do not vote according to their convictions from fear of consequences. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Fundamental problem in American democracy is that we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers. — Alex Gibney

I should think that an ordinary copy of the King James version would have been good enough for those Congressmen. — Calvin Coolidge

Having federal officials, whether judges, bureaucrats, or congressmen, impose a new definition of marriage on the people is an act of social engineering profoundly hostile to liberty. — Ron Paul

Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar and
perhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality. — Alan W. Watts

I never imagined working with CEOs, congressmen or the military, yet I make regular visits to the Pentagon, stop by the Capitol now and then and sit down with leaders of all kinds of companies. — Simon Sinek

There is no company - no corporation on earth that engages in accounting fraud to the extent the Imperial Federal Government of the United Sates does. Not many congressmen are willing to come forward with the details. — Neal Boortz

I'm Going To Make Available To Every American The Same Health Care Plan That Senators And Congressmen Give Themselves. — John F. Kerry

Pursue whatever it is that you want to do with your life. It is the only secret to happiness that I know except for maybe true love, that and maybe having the amazing health insurance plan that our congressmen have. — Lewis Black

Money bought access. But the Second American Revolution had happened, people began taking the Constitution seriously again, and the practice of renting and buying congressmen had been stopped by the simple expedient of getting money out of the campaigns. Contributions of all types became illegal. Campaigns were funded by the voters. You gave money to a politician, it constituted bribery, and you could go to jail. — Jack McDevitt

You know, when we get to a point in this country where dissent is extremism, we've turned, I think, a very dark page in our history. And I don't want us to go there. I encourage Americans and I'm - right now, to go to these town hall meetings, to - to talk to your Congressmen, the people that you elected. — Michael Steele

There isn't a political price to be paid yet for doing nothing. People need to get upset with President Bush. People need to get upset with their Congressmen. — Nicholas D. Kristof

The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates. — Sinclair Lewis

Fear and anger, the two emotions that most people came to him to reduce - emotions that he'd worked so hard to overcome in his own life - were fuel for politicians. Maybe candidates and congressmen thought that sowing discord among countrymen, even family members, was an unfortunate type of collateral damage. Maybe they didn't think about it at all. — Gudjon Bergmann

It would be revealed years later that the language had been lifted almost verbatim from an ad that had appeared in the New York Times and other papers over the names of isolationist congressmen, written and paid for by Nazi agents. — Richard Moe

The congressmen and senators used to go have a drink in D.C. They would disagree all day long, but they would find that time to sit down and learn about each other personally. I think that's totally wiped out; I don't think it really exists anymore. — Zach Galifianakis

So you write to our congressmen
With bleeding pens
Of the sorrow within
And in return they just send
Tickets to the latest Tom Hanks show — Jewel

The worst of these comments came in mid-April from the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who said in a press conference, "This war is lost" and "The surge is not accomplishing anything." I was furious and shared privately with some of my staff a quote from Abraham Lincoln I had written down long before: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — Robert M. Gates

Television has changed how we choose our leaders. It elected Ronald Reagan and a host of Kennedy-look-alike congressmen with blow-dried hair and gleaming teeth. It destroyed Senator Joe McCarthy by showing him in action and it created Jerry Falwell. — Ronald Steel

I am, indeed, against all proselyters, whether they be on my side or on some other side. What moves nine-tenths of them, I believe, is simply the certainty of the result that I have just mentioned. Their lofty pretensions are all tosh. The thing they yearn for is the satisfaction of making someone unhappy: that yearning is almost as universal among them as thirst is in dry Congressmen. — H.L. Mencken

Experience is terribly important. You'll notice that the congressmen who want to hold up the government are all junior people and new to the game. And of course they will say, 'Oh, it's Washington cynicism, where they all compromise and work out backroom deals.' But that's actually how democracy works." Which — Sarah Vowell

What Democratic congressmen do to their women staffers, Republican congressmen do to the country. — Bill Maher

When the Mattachine Society of Washington's founder, Frank Kameny, testified to a congressional committee in 1962, he informed his interrogators that the group's mailing list had only about a hundred names on it. That was inconceivable to congressmen such as John Dowdy, a Texas Democrat who had assumed that the society was an arm of a "national and international organization" with "up in the millions" of members.79 The committee was puzzled further by the fact that Kameny believed that there were a quarter-million homosexuals in the city - not because they doubted that there were so many, but because he didn't have each one's contact information. The investigators assumed, Johnson wrote, "that homosexuals were inherently drawn to the same clique and would somehow all be on the same mailing list. — Jesse Walker

few years after Ball was herded south, a slave trader marched a coffle past the US Capitol just as a gaggle of congressmen took a cigar break on the front steps. One of the captive men raised his manacles and mockingly sang "Hail Columbia," a popular patriotic song. — Edward E. Baptist

The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back — Will Rogers

Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke pot will someday become congressmen and legalize it in order to protect themselves. — Lenny Bruce

A lot of Congressmen yesterday were upset when Kenneth Lay took the Fifth. Lay said it wasn't his fault. He had planned on testifying, but when Jeffrey Skilling testified, he took all the really good lies. — Jay Leno

New Yorkers your voices must be heard. Tell your state Congressmen to support same sex marriage bill. All you need is love — Madonna Ciccone

General Motors, General Mills, General Foods, general ignorance, general apathy, and general cussedness elect presidents and Congressmen and maintain them in power. — Herbert M. Shelton

I don't know what these Republican congressmen drink that make them experts on women's reproductive health. — Jackie Speier

The main point of the Klan's orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting - voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members. — Dinesh D'Souza

What kind of leader sends congressmen out on a kamikaze mission in an election year and right before a recess? The kind of leader whose followers are diminishing in number. — Jed Babbin

More and more Congressmen now stay in Washington all year-round because they can't stay at home under the laws they've passed. — Sam Levenson

There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen. — Sydney J. Harris

Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have all complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one-time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed. There is still no consensus on how to solve the problem or where to get the massive amounts of money needed to fix it, just another example of political paralysis in Washington. — Steve Kroft

Unlike in the Northern states, the only elected officials in Virginia were federal congressmen and state legislators; all the rest were either selected by the legislature or appointed by the governor or the county courts, which were self-perpetuating oligarchies that dominated local government. Thus popular democratic politics in Virginia and elsewhere in the South was severely limited, especially in contrast to the states of the North, where nearly all state and local offices had become elective and the turbulence of politics and the turnover of offices were much greater. — Gordon S. Wood

In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy. — Howard Fast

have under his thumb powerful congressmen, senators, even the vice president himself, — David Baldacci

Congressmen are like diapers - You need to change them often, and for the same reason — Pete McCloskey

Iraq has become, for better or for worse, the front on the war on terrorism, and so we've got to do this, and I can understand why congressmen and senators would take their responsibility seriously, but I think in the end we'll get the money. — Paul Bremer

To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it. — Henry Adams

I respect commas far more than I respect congressmen. — Ursula K. Le Guin

If a theology student in lowa should get up at a PTA luncheon in Sioux City and attack the President's military policy, my guess is that you would probably find it reported somewhere the next morning in the New York Times. But when 300 Congressmen endorse the President's policy, the next morning it is apparently not considered news fit to print. — Spiro T. Agnew

I have done it [appointed commissions] regretfully and with the hope that it would be temporary. But after a commission is established you find it always wants to enlarge itself, employ more people, is very busy with Senators and Congressmen to impress upon them the great value of the services of the commission, and even when I talk to people that I appoint to commissions and tell them I would like them to go on to various boards with the idea that they may be abolished, they say they ought to be abolished, but when they have taken their position they very soon seem to change their mind. — Calvin Coolidge

I'm not a professional politician. I'm a professional problem solver, and I believe we should cut the salaries of senators and congressmen 10 percent until they balance the budget. I call that conservative common sense. — Herman Cain

Congressmen had a use for their very own son of a bitch. — Rick Perlstein

The moral panic about supposedly unpatriotic educators was driven by international war hysteria combined with agitation over the growing domestic political strength of teachers unions. In 1917 and 1918, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to ban public speech and actions "disloyal" to the United States military and government, especially among socialists, communists, pacifists, immigrants, and other groups perceived as affiliated with European leftism. More than any other force, the American Legion, a veterans' organization, pushed this ethos of unquestioning patriotism onto the nation's public schools. The Legion was influential: 16 U.S. senators and 130 congressmen identified as members. It promoted the idea that the Communist Party in Moscow actively recruited American teachers in order to enlist them in brainwashing the nation's youth. The Legion saw all left-of-center political activity as unacceptably anti-American. — Dana Goldstein

The last line of Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen is addressed to the American people and their congressmen. "As they deal with me and my people, kindly, generously, and justly, so may the Great Ruler of all nations deal with the grand and glorious nation of the United States of America." It's clever to imply that if the U.S. swallows up her little country, God will smite it. As I reread the last sentance of a book written by a Hawaiian queen wh was taught to read and write by American missionaries, her final thought seems emblematic of how hierarchical Hawaiians adapted to Christianity. Jehovah, "the Great Ruler of all nations," is the highest high chief in the universe. — Sarah Vowell

Why are congressmen called public servants? You never see servants that anxious to keep their jobs. — Robert Quillen

So what? A lobbyist cheated Indian tribes out of $25 million then laundered their money through phony Christian charities trying to stop other Indian tribes from getting casinos [on screen: 'Thou Shalt Not Compete'] and bribe congressmen in the process. Know what I call that? I call that business as usual in Washington. [on screen: 'Screwing Indians'] — Stephen Colbert

I have spent my career trying to get Congressmen to spend the people's money as if it were their own. But I have failed. — William Proxmire

When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn't. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn't unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security. — Eric Schlosser

The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health
congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher. — Calvin Trillin

I'm starting to like muggers more than congressmen. At least the muggers don't claim they're doing you a favor. — Paul Jacob

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'. — Bob Dylan

Congressmen spend between five and seven hours a day on the phone, begging for money. — Eric Massa

Now you know how I fooled you," he would say. "Try to figure out on your own how your congressmen and clergymen fool you. There is no restraint that isn't self-imposed: you are all absolutely free. — Robert Anton Wilson