The curious fascination in this job [U.S. representative] is the illusion that either you are being useful or you could be -- and that's so tempting.

When two working people decide to marry, their federal income tax is usually increased. As soon as one spouse earns at least 20 percent of a married couple's total income, the couple pays a 'marriage tax.' ... The United States is the only major industrialized nation in the free world in which the tax cost of the second [married] earner's entry into the work force is higher than that of the first. On one hand, our government's social policy is to help working women earn equal salaries to those of men, but on the other we have a tax structure that penalizes them when they do so.

Wherever injustice occurs, we all need to be concerned.

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.

A code of behavior is an inevitable part of life in any community, and if we hadn't inherited ours, we should have had to invent one.

The business of government is justice.

Economics is not a science, in the sense that a policy can be repeatedly applied under similar conditions and will repeatedly produce similar results.