Barney Frank People Quotations

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.

People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

As a liberal, I am morally obligated to be pragmatic. What good do I do poor people, elderly people, people who are being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation if I'm not realistic about accomplishing something.

I hope we will not so characterize religious people as being so narrow and so biased towards people not of their own religion that they cannot even work with them in this common cause to which you say they are committed.

Most people who are activists and are concerned about issues get their information from sources which reinforce their opinions and give them the facts that they want to hear.

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

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.

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.

If people knew of ethics violations, they should have sent them to the Ethics Committee. If you think there was serious ethics violation that ought to be looked at, you don't hold it back for retaliatory purposes.

Today, many people take for granted the notion that people whose lives are going to be very heavily affected by public policies should have a say in how they are formulated and carried out.

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.

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.

I have done a lot of work for affordable housing, rental housing. I understand the rap on me and other liberals is, oh, we push poor people into homeownership. And it's exactly the opposite of the case. We were trying to prevent those kinds of bad loans.

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.

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.

The fact that theyre a congressionally chartered group should no more incline people to give to that group than the fact that its National Pickle Month should make them eat more pickles.

In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.

Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.

The rights of the people who have done terrible things are hard to defend. You have to keep pointing out, the question is the process to determine whether they've done the terrible things.

There is a correlation between people who attack same-sex marriage and have difficulty maintaining their own.

Whenever people are being intellectually dishonest in debate, it is an implicit concession they have lost the fight

Going before an audience of people who expect you to be funny is tough. Going before an audience that expect you to be boring, and then being a little funny, is much easier. I prefer easier.

Take free speech: most of the tough cases on free speech involve very unpleasant people saying very obnoxious things.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn't have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

If you care deeply about a cause and you are then engaged on behalf of that cause in an activity that makes you feel very good and very brave and you're really in solidarity with all your friends, and you're enjoying it, you're probably not advancing the cause very much, because you're spending all your time with people you agree with cheering each other on and not engaging.

These two entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.

It is a very bad idea for the United States government to spend tens of billions of dollars to send people to Mars and to the moon,

People have been scared straight, and between now and Election Day will be one of the purest periods in American life.

When I spoke to him, the first thing I did was tease him, saying I thought this was a ploy because he wants to run for Congress. It's not anything that's fun to do, sharing with people intimate things about himself, but it's important and unimportant at the same time. It's something important for him to be honest with people, but it doesn't affect how he does his job.

You showed your credentials by being able to talk about all this detail, but a lot of people - including Democrats - got sucked into it. They learned the lingo, but they forgot it had no relation to reality. It was like critics of 'The Three Stooges' debating the right way to squirt seltzer up your nose. They forgot that the whole thing was a little silly.

This is a timetable for making sure nothing gets resolved before the elections. I don't understand what's going to take many, many more months other than the need for the Republicans to resolve their political dilemma, which is how do you satisfy your own people who want an impeachment with the general public who appears to be less so.

They not only didn't do anything to protect him, they're not doing anything now to protect people in the future. It's really a disgrace.

That seems to many people an insufficient basis for an impeachment.

I hope the regulators understand by now there is, I think, unanimity on this committee that they should experiment, they should be flexible, they should do everything reasonable to get money into people's hands because people need money to eat and to live and because that's the way we're going to bring the economy back,