Jerry Brown Quotes

Even when you sign a treaty like I think [Richard] Nixon did, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, George W. Bush reneged on it. He got out of. So any treaty can be withdrawn from.

The whole Jeffersonian ideal was that people are temporarily in government. Government is not the basic reality. People are. The private sector. And government is just a limited power to make things go better.

We're going to move left and right at the same time.

Basically, if you have above-average intelligence, you have common sense and you can speak in front of a camera and to a crowd, you can govern the state.

At least when I was govenor, cocaine was expensive.

Pension reform can be hard to talk about. In the long run, reform now means fewer demands for layoffs and less draconian measures in the future. It's in the best interest of all Californians to fix this system now.

Several unions have agreed to larger employee contributions for their members. Taxpayers are living with cuts and making sacrifices to deal with the reality of California's budget crisis, state workers are going to have to do the same.

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

The Republicans are committed to global warming as a hoax, or irrelevant, or as not a problem. That is their belief. I'm not going to put them in jail. All I can do is talk and encourage good climate actions and demonstrate our economy has benefited here [in California].

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

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

Sometimes the highest form of action is inaction.

Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.

You've got the oil companies fighting Pope Francis. Fighting the scientists of the world. Fighting the governor of California. They are engaged in literally a life-and-death struggle, and I have no doubt who is going to be the victor.

‎We need to become more unreasonable but in an intelligent way.

Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we're all in it together. It'll work when there's a shared sense of destiny. It can be done!

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

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

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.

I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.

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.

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.

If you say the world is totally dependent on oil in many parts of the world, coal and certainly natural gas, we are fossil fuel, that is modernity, modernity has two elements: individualism and oil. Now to move toward a more enlightened sustainable world, we have to transform with lots of technology, with even differences in the way we see the world and how we live in the world. That`s going to take decades.

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

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

You're all welcome in California.

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.

The volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

We're going to get that little bug before that little bug gets my poll ratings down any further.

We`re not going to have a backlash. We`re going to build a consensus. And I live in the real world, not the kind of fantasy goals that we would all like, but we would never achieve if we go about it in the blunderbuss fashion that your question would assume.

We have to restore power to the family, to the neighborhood, and the community with a non-market principle, a principle of equality, of charity, of let's-take-care-of-one-another. That's the creative challenge.

The farmers markets were another step to giving people an opportunity to take more power over their own lives-and also to provide another outlet for organic produce. That is important because the production and distribution of food is increasingly being monopolized and controlled by large corporate structures, large financial structures.

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

Multinational corporations do control. They control the politicians. They control the media. They control the pattern of consumption, entertainment, thinking. They're destroying the planet and laying the foundation for violent outbursts and racial division.

I understand we have to keep a significant amount of fossil fuel in the ground. I`m committed to that. But I`m not going to just all of a sudden try to stop the cars of California or to increase dramatically the number of ships carrying oil into the state when we already have our own production.

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

Were I to stop oil production, we`d have to import it from Iraq and from Caracas, Venezuela or from North Dakota where the environmental standards are much lower, on trains that have already proven themselves unsafe, or by more ships that are causing significant pollution in the world. It`s just really dumb.

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.