Alan K. Simpson Quotations

If you're in the game long enough, you're going to be the toast of the town one day, and the next day you'll be toast.

He's a million rubber bands in his resilience.

I consider abortion to be a deeply personal and intimate issue for women and I don't believe male legislators should even vote on the issue.

An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.

Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word.

The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.

You were doing a sadistic little disservice to your country.

Reagan didn't put anything off the table, if he felt it was for the good of the American people to tweak the tax system.

He has to do the heavy lifting and the windows and the wash, and also protect the president.

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.

Those who travel the high road of humility are not troubled by heavy traffic.

Nonetheless, GAO's conclusion that employer sanctions had somehow caused employment discrimination was contradicted by GAO's own Chief of Methodology, who criticized the GAO report. ...here is what she said, 'I believe the truth is that we have no strong causal link between IRCA and discrimination, and in [my] view it is just as likely that the discrimination we found has always been there, or that it is spurious, as that IRCA has caused it.'

So let us take our fair share of the true refugees and act responsible as a government in providing for their necessary expenses. Let us stop skewing the whole process by taking some folks who are not truly refugees in order simply to meet our foreign policy needs or domestic policy demands. There has to be a better way to meet those needs and demands than we are doing now. I think it is embarrassing to all of us who truly know the mission of the Refugee Act.

There is no 'slippery slope' toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

Grandchildren now don't write a thank you for the Christmas presents. They are walking on their pants with their cap on backward, listening to the Enema Man and Snoopy, Snoopy Poop Dog.

If you torture statistics long enough, they'll eventually confess the truth

People tend to stay at home and eat a home-cooked meal. There are three days that are really slow for restaurants - Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.

I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again. I'm an Alan Simpson Republican.

It doesn't matter is you call it 'Obama-care' or 'Elvis Presley care' or 'I-don't-care care.' It cannot sustain itself in its present form.

Now it's just sharp elbows, and instead of having a caucus where you sit down and say, 'What are you doing for your country?' you sit figuring out how to screw the other side.

A society like ours, which professes no one religion and has allowed all religions to decay, which indulges freedom to the point of license and individualism to the point of anarchy, needs all the support that responsible, cultivated homes can furnish. I hope your generation will provide a firmer shelter for civilized standards.

I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that "gay" is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman's on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge.

Every time one of us starts talking about more effective immigration controls, somebody else throws up the Statue of Liberty, how we're a nation of immigrants and all of that. The debate takes on tinges of racism, emotion.

It is a travesty, in my mind, for the state and local governments on the one hand to expect the Federal government to reimburse them for costs attributable to illegal immigrants, when on the other hand the State and local governments prohibit their own law enforcement and other officials from cooperating with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to locate or apprehend or expel illegal aliens.

We have two political parties in this country, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I belong to the Stupid Party.

In your country club, your church, and business, about fifteen percent of the people are screwballs, lightweights, and boobs, and you would not want those people unrepresented in Congress.