#Policy Quotes

“Honesty is not the best policy - merely the safest”

“If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing.”

“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

“There is no greater mistake than to suppose that platitudes, smooth words, timid policies, offer today a path to safety.”

“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

“Congress knew Coolidge would veto the farm bill. There was more politics than relief in that bill.”

“When everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they raise them. That's statesmanship of the highest order.”

“In Great Britain, governments often change their policies without changing their men. In France, they usually change their men without changing their policy.”

“The business of government is to keep the government out of business - that is, unless business needs government aid.”

“We shall not, I believe, be obliged to alter our policy of watchful waiting.”

“We see the wisdom of Solon's remark, that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear.”

“Just read the farm relief bill. It's just a political version of Einstein's last theory. If a farmer could understand it, he certainly would know more than to farm. He would be a professor at Harvard.”

“This session of Congress is also to relieve the farmer again, relieve him of any encouragement that he might have received during the last one.”

“Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone's guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.”

“What the Secretary of Agriculture is trying to do is to teach the farmer corn acreage control, and the hogs birth control, and one is just as hard to make understand it as the other.”

“The government says they have loaned over One Billion dollars to the Farmers. In other words, we can't help you make any money, but we will show you where you can owe some more.”

“We've got a wonderful economic formula in this country.”

“What's going to happen - things we're doing are going to have some inflationary consequences.”

“Many bad policies are simply good policies taken too far.”

“Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.”

“Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.”

“Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.”

“Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.”

“You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don't make bad decisions based on empathy.”

“No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results.”

“Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.”

“Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.”

“No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?”

“The difference between a policy and a crusade is that a policy is judged by its results, while a crusade is judged by how good it makes its crusaders feel.”

“That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt. Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 - that is what it amounts to, with interest.”

“If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.”

“It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.”

“A broader reading of history shows that appeasement, no matter how it is labeled, never fulfills the hopes of the appeasers.”

“Conservation and rural-life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at the bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily given for the future.”

“Government is not the solution, but rather the cause of our problems.”

“It should be clear to everyone that the nation's steadfast policy should afford every American of working age a realistic opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some meaningful form of property in a growing national economy.”

“When the Labor Department is forced to relent and let these visitors do this work it is of course all legal. But it makes one wonder about the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won't do? One thing is certain in this hungry world; no regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the field for lack of harvesters.”

“If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.”

“...I believe that it is not enough, as I said, to tinker at the margins of U.S. immigration law... the United States must institute comprehensive reforms that conform to the realities of the era in which we live.”

“We desire peace. But peace is a goal, not a policy. Lasting peace is what we hope for at the end of our journey. It doesn't describe the steps we must take nor the paths we should follow to reach that goal.”

“Carrying arms for the removal of the Arms Act can never fall under any scheme of nonviolence.”

“Let's face it.., our current [immigration control] system is like a busy intersection without a traffic cop: sure there are laws on the books, but absent enforcement, there are too many accidents.”

“Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”

“Democracy demands patient instruction on it before legislation.”

“No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.”

“We should tax things we don't like. We should tax pollution ... And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest labor, like food.”

“I don't think meals have any business being deductible. I'm for separation of calories and corporations.”

“Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one - except warfare - achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.”

“Nonviolence is a good policy when the conditions permit.”

“The policies of all powers are inherent in their geography.”