United Way Campaign Quotes & Sayings

In the United States ... politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals. — H.L. Mencken

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars - they would think the country has gone insane. — Noam Chomsky

I think that the influence of people with power and money to distort democracy and have their interests served before the rest of the population is the biggest problem. That is caused by two things: campaign finance and the way that's structured, and by the Citizen's United supreme court decision. So those two things are keeping democracy from working right. — Shepard Fairey

The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money. — H.L. Mencken

On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an Ivy League college or run a serious campaign for president. — Dee Dee Myers

If one does not wish to take the word of journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations that Iraq conducted a deliberate campaign to eradicate the Kurdish population, there's always the word of the Iraqis themselves. — Timothy Noah

All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy. — H.L. Mencken

Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising young man - somebody told me as much. And it is true. He'll make the Governor's Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the United States Senate." "What makes you think so?" Mrs. Morse had inquired. "I've heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid and unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot help but regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so much like the platitudes of the average voter that - oh, well, you know you flatter any man by dressing up his own thoughts for him and presenting them to him. — Jack London

My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months' campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative. — William Graham Sumner

One of the reasons this election is so important is because the Supreme Court hangs in the balance. We need to overturn that terrible Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, and then reform our whole campaign finance system. — Hillary Clinton

We deserve a president of the United States who will write laws for all Americans, not for campaign contributors. And I intend to be a president for all Americans who takes back the flag of our country because it doesn't belong to any party, doesn't belong to any president. — John F. Kerry

She is a 13-year-old girl who shares Amanda's name, and politely explained that she could not give up the website. Why? Because the younger Amanda plans to be president of the United States, and she's going to need the website for her campaign. — Eva Longoria

The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them. — Christopher Hitchens

When you run for president of the United States, everybody does the same thing in the campaign-they talk about veterans, how much they admire them, how grateful they are. — Mark Shields

There was always this sense, even early on in the campaign, that if the senator Obama could score this upset victory in Iowa, that there was a pretty good chance that he would end up being president of the United States. — Josh Earnest

In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power. — Nicholson Baker

This campaign was never just about electing a president of the United States - as enormously important as that was. This campaign was about transforming America. It was about the understanding that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always takes place from the bottom on up. It takes place when ordinary people, by the millions, are prepared to stand up and fight for justice. That — Bernie Sanders

I'm not trying to get myself up a notch on the ladder by shoving somebody else down on the ladder, whether it's a candidate or the president of the United States or anybody else. I just don't believe that's the way one oughta campaign, I've never done that. — George H. W. Bush

In his important work on the subject, Stephen Sizer has revealed how Christian Zionists have constructed a historical narrative that describes the Muslim attitude to Christianity throughout the ages as a kind of a genocidal campaign, first against the Jews and then against the Christians.12 Hence, what were once hailed as moments of human triumph in the Middle East - the Islamic renaissance of the Middle Ages, the golden era of the Ottomans, the emergence of Arab independence and the end of European colonialism - were recast as the satanic, anti-Christian acts of heathens. In the new historical view, the United States became St. George, Israel his shield and spear, and Islam their dragon. — Noam Chomsky

you're worried about Congress being manipulated by money, the United States House of Representatives started filing their campaign contributions electronically a decade ago, yet the United States Senate refuses to do so. Year after year a bill is proposed, and one way or another it ends up suffocating and dying by the end of the session. This results in a half-million dollar expense to the taxpayer as the Federal Election Commission takes nearly three months to type in, from the various campaigns' paper reports, every campaign contribution that every Senate campaign receives. And as a result, we cannot see how a member of the United States Senate is being influenced by money until long after the time when the relevance of that information has passed. — Clay A. Johnson

A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States ... [we] must design a stable, low-consumption economy. — John Holdren

Jackson began raids into Florida, arguing it was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and for marauding Indians. Florida, he said, was essential to the defense of the United States. It was that classic modern preface to a war of conquest. Thus began the Seminole War of 1818, leading to the American acquisition of Florida. It appears on classroom maps politely as "Florida Purchase, 1819" - but it came from Andrew Jackson's military campaign across the Florida border, burning Seminole villages, seizing Spanish forts, until Spain was "persuaded" to sell. He acted, he said, by the "immutable laws of self-defense. — Howard Zinn

The United Nations is proud to have the Adopt-A-Minefield Campaign as a partner. — Kofi Annan

The Republican Party is slightly ahead of Democrats when it come to devaluing any traditional understanding of foreign and national security policy. This is not surprising, because in all other matter of public policy, the GOP has strictly subordinated practical governance and problem solving to the emotional thematics of an endless political campaign. Whether the topic is Iran, Russia, or the proper level of defense spending at a time of high deficits, the GOP's stance has little to do with the merits of the situation; it is a projection of domestic political sloganeering. Taking a position on anything, whcther it be Ukraine or the efficacy of drones, boils down to a talking-point projection of focus groups-tested emotional themes: strength versus weakness, standing tall versus cutting and running, acting versus thinking." pp. 157-158 — Mike Lofgren

The number one lobby that opposes campaign finance reform in the United States is the National Association of Broadcasters. — Robert McChesney

Riveted by these events, reporters gave little thought to the hearings taking place that afternoon in Room 424 of the Senate Office Building, where a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee sat to consider a proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States. If passed, it would have declared, "This Nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God."1 The campaign — Kevin M. Kruse

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black. — Christopher Hitchens

In 1980 we declared the globe free of smallpox. It was the largest campaign in United Nations history until the Iraq war. A hundred and fifty thousand people from all over the world, doctors of every race, religion, culture and nation, who fought side by side, brothers and sisters, with each other, not against each other, in a common cause to make the world better. — Larry Brilliant

The Constitution is quite clear that no person "except a natural born citizen" is eligible to be president of the United States, but there is no such restriction placed on a president's wife. Louisa Adams is the only one of a long line of First Ladies who were born abroad, and although her father was an American and citizenship her birthright, it became an issue that was used against her husband, John Quincy Adams, when he ran for the presidency. It was a whispering campaign, to be sure, because most people knew very well that Louisa was as much a citizen as they were. A large number of people didn't understand that children born to Americans abroad inherited their parents' rights, and in Louisa's case, even some of those who did know this weren't so sure that the rule applied to her because her mother was a British subject. — Bill Harris

By 1945, a growing number of whites in the North had concluded that the Jim Crow system would have to be modified, if not entirely overthrown. This consensus was due to a number of factors, including the increased political power of blacks due to migration to the North and the growing membership and influence of the NAACP, particularly its highly successful legal campaign challenging Jim Crow laws in federal courts. Far more important in the view of many scholars, however, is the influence of World War II. The blatant contradiction between the country's opposition to the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and the continued existence of a racial caste system in the United States was proving embarrassing, severely damaging the nation's credibility as leader of the "free world. — Michelle Alexander

The majority of terrorist attacks that have been disrupted in the United States have been disrupted due to things like the Time Square bomber, who was caught by a hotdog vendor, not a mass surveillance program, not a cyber-espionage campaign. — Edward Snowden

It is always disagreeable to take stands. It is always easier to compromise, always easier to let things go. To many women, and I am one of them, it is extraordinarily difficult to care about anything enough to cause disagreement or unpleasant feelings, but I have come to the conclusion that this must be done for a time until we can prove our strength and demand respect for our wishes. We cannot even be of real service in the coming campaign and speak as a united body of women unless we have the respect of men and show that when we express a wish, we are willing to stand by it. — Eleanor Roosevelt

We did not lack for religious leaders to urge us into "godly" war [ ... ]. All of this was part of a well-financed propaganda campaign on the part of British agents. As usual, the government of the United States was being "run" by the British Secret Intelligence Service. — Eustace Mullins

And it's the President of the United States who said he wasn't going to spike the football and all this, we shouldn't gloat about it, running campaign ads, gloating about it and saying the other guy isn't good enough to do the tough things that I did, which I think is, one reprehensible. — Jonah Goldberg

The film 'Documented,' a project of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Define American campaign, is about my families: the family I was blessed to be born into, and the family of friends, mentors and allies that I found when I moved to the United States at 12, a Filipino kid trying to make sense of my new home in America. — Jose Antonio Vargas

During the 1990s the United States sought to impose the 'Washington Consensus' on Latin American governments. It embodied what Latin Americans call 'neo-liberal' principles: budget cuts, privatization, deregulation of business, and incentives for foreign companies. This campaign sparked bitter resistance and ultimately collapsed. — Stephen Kinzer