Policy Quotes

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, andnot to answer them:this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“As she had done when she introduced the US president in Berlin, she addressed him publicly with the informal du for the first time since the NSA controversy in 2013.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“Let me make two remarks. First I concentrate on the task ahead for 2016. I’m quite busy with that—thank you very much. And I’m looking with great interest in the American election campaign.’ For the second time during their press conference, the clicking sounds of the cameras was deafening.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“An Affair With The Media
Being President presupposes a relationship with the media. One does have control over the intimacy of that connection.
My media association might be best represented by the following interview, recently undertaken for this book:
“What do you think of Newstime’s review of your book, Madam President?”
“Newstime’s review? Surely you mean Bill Bologna who works for Newstime?”
“Well, yes.”
“Now, Bill Bologna. What has he published?”
“He’s a critic. He does reviews.”
“Oh, he gets paid for reading what other people have published and then writing what he thinks of their writing?”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“After iris-scanning was legally accepted as identity verification for drivers licenses, passports and so much more, anyone could securely log onto the Internet from any computer anywhere via such a scan.
Elections (much less air travel) have never been the same”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“It became increasingly common to resolve international tensions by legal means. The chant “Criminal Trials, Not Missiles” became prevalent after its use in my first State of the Union address. Nice ring to it.”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“I wheeled and dealed with leaders from all over the world on behalf of the American people. In fact, my favorite headline from Washington Speaks magazine was “She Walks, She Talks, She Negotiates”.”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

[Olmstead v. U.S.,277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]”
― Louis D. Brandeis

“Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“While the government is" studying "and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work...
A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.
(pg.87, "Think Little" )”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied.
But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“If a policy is wrongheaded feckless and corrupt I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.”
― David Hackworth

“We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.”
― Al Gore

“Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on 'The Survival of the Fittest.' These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.”
― Mark Twain

“If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If we are to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that these measures are forging for them. The country will swarm with informers, spies, delators and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of a despotic power... [T]he hours of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendship, or the recesses of domestic retirement afford no security. The companion whom you most trust, the friend in whom you must confide, the domestic who waits in your chamber, all are tempted to betray your imprudent or unguarded follie; to misrepresent your words; to convey them, distorted by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides — where fear officiates as accuser and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard... Do not let us be told, Sir, that we excite a fervour against foreign aggression only to establish a tyranny at home; that [...] we are absurd enough to call ourselves ‘free and enlightened’ while we advocate principles that would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity and establish a code compared to which the ordeal is wise and the trial by battle is merciful and just."

[opposing the Alien & Sedition bills of 1798, in Congress]”
― Edward Livingston

“The building of publicly funded stadiums has become a substitue for anything resembling an urban policy.”
― Dave Zirin, A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play

“Moral and educational suasion breathes the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history that says otherwise. Look at the soaring White support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods decadesafterthe policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decadesafterthe policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacareafterits passage in 2010. Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will never come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Scholars have long debated whether capital markets lead to appropriate levels of saving and investment for future generations.”
― David L. Weimer, Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice

“I also believe that the one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of times does not.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Everyone is in favor of environmental sustainability...until they have to pay for it.”
― Scott Irwin, Back to the Futures: Crashing Dirt Bikes, Chasing Cows, and Unraveling the Mystery of Commodity Futures Markets

“With the barriers between home and work life increasingly fragile, and with the new electronic technology putting increasingly great stress on workers’ physical and mental health, protection of workers’ private time is of increasing importance.”
― Jon Peirce, Work Less: New Strategies for a Changing Workplace

“Due to the earned sick time policy of the USA, it is likely you are working with COVID-19 infected workers that do not have sufficient earned sick time to stay home and recover from their highly infectious disease!”
― Steven Magee

“The Intention of policy should be to help people.”
― Harjeet Khanduja, HR Mastermind

“Organizations change policies to suit their business objectives and send cultural signals for people to modify their behaviors.”
― Harjeet Khanduja, HR Mastermind

“In 1900, George Q. Cannon, First Counselor in the First Presidency, led a 'conversation between the First Presidency respecting the negro race.' Cannon 'asked President Snow if the question was not already decided,' but President Snow 'spoke as though it was not,' an indication that even as late a 1900, the President of the Church, Lorenzo Snow, did not consider the racial restriction a settled matter.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“Profound policy thrives on perpetual creation, on a constant re-definition of goals. Good administration thrives on routine, the definition of relationships which can survive mediocrity. Policy involves an adjustment of risks; administration an avoidance of deviation....The attempt to conduct policy bureaucratically leads to a quest for calculability which tends to become a prisoner of events.”
― Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22

“Programs should be about people for people for people are more important than programs.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“No cause is ever so great that we must lie to insure its survival.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough