Jerry Brown Quotes

The conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs.

The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs. This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.

My principles are simple. Protect the Earth. Serve the People, and Explore the Universe

I would like to maximize the level of human choice in the medical field...The choice of a treatment in many ways is like the exercise of religion.

You're all welcome in California.

The volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.

Life simply is. It follows its course. Give yourself to the moment. Let life reveal itself to you.

Check out my web site, wtp.org, to see what fast food did to 2 people in England.

Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void.

The reason that everybody likes planning is that nobody has to do anything.

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization in education is crucial to both freedom and excellence.

I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.

I will defend everybody, every man, woman and child who's come to California for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.

Organic farming is about buying out of a corrupt, illegal and dishonest system.

I reject get-it-done, make-it-happen thinking. I want to slow things down so I understand others better.

We have to be realistic about what the state can afford, and put an end to abuses of the system that cost millions.

America will be disadvantaged, just like Detroit was disadvantaged when they couldn't build smaller cars in the '70s or '80s. The world shifts.

Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.

Let us not mince words about what this would be: a deportation force designed to break up families and deport millions of people.

Inaction may be the biggest form of action.

When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.

Republican attacks are without basis, but when the Democrats attack me they're usually right.

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

There's nothing wrong with being an anarchist.

In some cases, managers and employees have secured pensions beyond their original base salary. It is wrong, the people doing it know it's wrong, and we have to put an end to it.

We have to deal with where we are. We have to create cooperatives, we have to create intentional communities, we have to work for local cooperation where we are.

It looks to me to be obvious that the whole world cannot eat an American diet.

I like computers. I like the Internet. It's a tool that can be used. But don't be misled into thinking that these technologies are anything other than aspects of a degenerate economic system.

Taking significant amounts of carbon out of our economy without harming its vibrancy is exactly the sort of challenge at which California excels.

Everyone's heard about the military-industrial complex, but they know very little about the medical-industrial complex...(in) a medical arms race.

The great problem with government is that it never goes bankrupt.

This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system.

Nuclear power will be the Vietnam issue of the 1980s.

Sometimes the highest form of action is inaction.

I question whether we can afford to teach mother macramé when Johnny still can't read.

The war on drugs is really no war at all - it's a business!

The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It's a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist system that is breaking down.

I supported to reduce oil consumption in California by 50 percent, 50 percent in the next 15 years. They didn't even bother to show up.

My goal in signing these [gun control ] bills is to enhance public safety by tightening our existing laws in a responsible and focused manner, while protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

The corporation is an out-of-control Frankenstein.

The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.

Let's draw the boundary early not wait until it's obvious like Hitler's Germany and insist that the state shall never, never, take the life of a person!

Not to mention the CIA which should be, I think, dissolved, it's of no use - a great source of mischief - I don't see any point to the FBI.

Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness.

Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.

The way people are treated in them [prisons] is very similar to gulags.

So we are being systematically trained to fear this false 'rising crime' tide. This is all part of a system to lock up more people, and impose more control and surveillance.