Interest Groups Quotes

You can't be all things to all people.

Politics need to stop treating women as a special-interest group.

Storytelling may be what most distinguishes social movements from interest groups.

Government cannot be all things to all people.

I've owned a business for 26 years. My family isn't in politics and my supporters aren't special interest groups in Madison and Milwaukee.

Politicians pay more attention to interest groups than to the public interest.

When I took the oath of office, I pledged loyalty to only one special interest group - ‘We the people’.

The United Nations has come under the control of outlaw nations and self-serving special interest groups.

We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers’ unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

People ask, quite legitimately, why [Betsy] DeVos and why not a lot of the others? But it's because it has to do with the special interest groups that run a lot of Washington.

You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves...

If every negotiation is conducted in public, then the minute one person says, well, what if we try this, next thing you know, the interest groups have piled all in, and the political opponents have shot it to pieces.

Politicians will pander to special-interest groups eager to gain at the public expense.

In U.S. politics, 'compassion' means giving money and privileges to well organized interest groups at everyone else's expense.

The essential task of Canadian statesmanship is to discover the terms on which as many as possible of the significant interest groups of our country can be induced to work together in common policy.

If zero percent of the elites support something, very low chance it's going to pass, if 100% support something, very high chance it's going to pass. Same thing for organized interest groups. But for the average voter, it's a flat line. Which says it doesn't matter whether zero percent of the public believes something or 100% of the average voters believe something - it doesn't affect the probability that that thing will be enacted.

All Politicians should be required to wear uniforms like Racing Car Drivers with patches showing the donations received from special interest groups so we know who has paid them off!

In a sense, whites who were always sort of the unthinking majority who didn't think of themselves necessarily as one among many interest groups but is simply the dominant group, now as whites become - are close to becoming a minority of Americans, are becoming a political interest group. And that's what Donald Trump is playing to. And it's a really dangerous, volatile game.

The problem is, of course, that these interest groups are all asking for changes, but their enthusiasm for change rapidly disappears when it affects the core of their own interests.

That is why everyone in politics, and we do it, must make sure that they do not depend on one single interest group. A good compromise is one where everybody makes a contribution.

Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd (even though he addressed himself to all). He did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to the single individual. Therefore everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd.

Was it a good idea to spend taxpayer dollars on electric cars in Finland, or on windmills in China? Was it a good idea to borrow all this money from countries like China and spend it on all these various different interest groups?

But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.

Career politicians do not have the courage to prioritize spending and say no to demanding special interest groups who do not reflect the best interests of the country.

People think that politics just somehow magically organizes itself. It doesn't work that way. You need to assemble these huge coalitions of 535 politicians on Capitol Hill, and tens of thousands of interest groups, and tens of millions of voters, and assemble all those in government to get stuff done.

Democratic capitalism: A cooperative enterprise to earn enough money to buy enough Congressional influence to gain control over the government's guns so as to get even more money for your special-interest group.Social democratic capitalism: A cooperative enterprise to promise sufficient government benefits to enough voters to gain control over the government's guns so as to keep any other special-interest group from getting as much power as yours.

I'm not sure I want to sound like a candidate. I just want to sound like an American who's trying to make this country a heck of a lot stronger. Not a politician typical, but somebody that's going to go and do the job, not pay attention to all the special interest groups, change the status quo, shift power out of Washington and get America on the track again with strengthening our military as well.

Campaign finance and ethics reform only works if it curtails all special interest groups equally and does not carve out any exceptions to benefit one party or another. 'Pay to play' reform was passed to limit the influence of big spending contractors over the public officials from whom they are trying to obtain work.

Once a bureau is created, its staff becomes a tenacious political interest group, well placed to defend its budget and to make a case for expanding its activities.

We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we're sick - professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, "We the people," this breed called Americans.

The Open Market Committee, as presently established, is plainly not in the public interest. This committee must be operated by purely public servants, representatives of the people as a whole and not any single interest group. The Open Market Committee should be abolished, and its powers transferred to the Federal Reserve Board - the present public members of the committee, with reasonably short terms of office.

But politicians who talk about failed policies are just blowing smoke. Government policies succeed in doing exactly what they are supposed to do: channeling resources bilked from the general public to politically organized and influential interests groups.

I was in bands as a singer-guitarist-songwriter until 1980-81. So, there's a bunch of stuff. A lot of the stuff is hard to come by-stuff by the Special Interest Group and the Zobo Funn Band. The Zobo Funn Band was a big Northeast cult band. We had about a billion skirmishes with the big rock industry.

If individuals do not occupy their legitimate position, then it will be occupied by a god or a king or a coalition of interest groups. If citizens do not exercise the powers confered by their legitimacy, others will do so. (I - The Great Leap Backwards)

There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups.

Bulgaria has been deindustrialized by interest groups who extracted state assets like oil states extract the oil in their ground.

But the consequences of the whole-hearted and uncritical embrace of politics by Christians has been, IN EFFECT, to reduce Christian faith to a political ideology and various Christian denominations and para-church organizations as special interest groups. The political engagement of the various Christian groups is certainly legal, but in ways that are undoubtedly unintended, it has also been counterproductive of the ends to which they aspire.

Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience: (1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups; (2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies; (3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest -- that is, challenge the idea of the public interest. This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.

Bowing to well-meaning, special-interest groups is an immoral way to run a company, given all the people it would hurt. We simply cannot allow arbitrary rules to be forced on us by organizations that lack business expertise.

If you are a minority or an interest group, the Democrats will hold the debate at your house. Whereas Republicans take a slightly different approach: they have a big tent - you're just not allowed in it.

Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis - how incentives influence behavior - to government.

The government has departments to deal with the special interest groups that make themselves heard and felt. A Department of Agriculture cares for the farmers' needs. There is a Department of Health, Education and Welfare. There is a Department of the Interior - in which the Indians are included. Is the farmer, the doctor, the Indian, the greatest problem in America today? No - it is the black man! There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems.

Since the 1920s, virtually all continuing medical and public health education is funded by pharmaceutical companies. In fact, today, the FDA can't even tell health scientists the truth about vaccine contaminants and their likely effects. The agency is bound and gagged by proprietary laws and non-disclosure agreements forced upon them by the pharmaceutical industry. Let us not forget that the pharmaceutical industry, as a special interest group, is the number one contributor to politicians on Capital Hill.

I believe that the teachers unions are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. They were designed to be professional organizations that protect the rights and privileges and pay of their members. The problem is that we don't have an organized national interest group with the same heft as the teachers union that's advocating on behalf of children.

It takes courage to set priorities because doing so is an admission that American policy cannot be all things to all people - or rather to all interest groups

Some liberal interest groups have come out in full force and have attempted to paint Judge [Samuel] Alito to be an extremist and to be an activist. They've criticized a nominee who has, from what I see described by these lawyers and fellow judges, a reputation of being a restrained jurist committed to the rule of law and the Constitution.

When you question a man's motives, when you say they are acting out of greed, they are in the pocket of an interest group, et cetera. It's awful hard to reach consensus. It's awful hard to reach across the table and shake hands. No matter how bitterly you disagree, though, it is always possible if you question judgment and not motive.

If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: "What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

It used to be that the working class, broadly speaking - Americans who worked with their hands, who worked in factories, who were not in management - were an interest group, a political interest group. And their main spokespersons were the Democrats. Their platform was the Democratic Party. And that began to change after the 1960s. Not for black or other working class Americans, but for white working class.