Quotes By Barney Frank

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.

Legislators have a formal set of responsibilities to work together, but there's no hierarchy.

When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.

I think there was an absolute, deep gap between consensual relations between adults, which people may like or dislike, and people who physically impose themselves on children or misuse their authority to impose on children.

I have been mislabeled as a big advocate of low-income home ownership over rental.

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.

For most of my life, I have eaten to deal with stress.

Lawyers are very, very good at keeping you out of prison, but they will sacrifice your reputation and credibility to do so.

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

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

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.

I am not a great theologian. I know there is a theological concept called invincible ignorance in which a strong enough faith binds you to any facts to the contrary.

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

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

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

People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.