Jerry Brown Quotes - Page 3

This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system.

President Trump is boldly moving in what I would call rather extreme directions. And that is going to set into motion a reaction, and it already has... He builds the strength on the other side to combat climate change.

The great problem with government is that it never goes bankrupt.

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.

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.

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

Republican attacks are without basis, but when the Democrats attack me they're usually right.

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

I've been in office and I've been out of office. And if I were to choose, I'd rather be in office.

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.

The way people are treated in them [prisons] is very similar to gulags.

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.

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.

Here the system is creating an industry around the drug issue when it does nothing to stop the corrupt military that moves the drugs, and the big banks that are all in cahoots with the President and the big shots in the Congress.

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

So we are being systematically trained to fear this false 'rising crime' tide. This is all part of a system to lock up more people, and impose more control and surveillance.

Okay, so what we really have to recognize and own as Americans is that our way of being is itself perhaps the greatest threat to the continuation of civilization.

When the farmer can sell directly to the consumer, it is a more active process. There's more contact. The consumer can know, who am I buying this from? What's their name? Do they have a face? Is the food they are selling coming out of Mexico with pesticides?

In some cases, managers and employees have secured pensions beyond their original base salary. It is wrong, the people doing it know it's wrong, and we have to put an end to it.

The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.

Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.

Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness.

The shuttle tomorrow is truly like laying the last spike on the transcontinental railroad, only much more so. And whether or not we're going to see in in the next 10 or 20 years, there are people alive today who will see manufacturing in space from moon materials or from asteroids.

The drug war isn't what purports to be. If you look at the whole operation and the tie-in between the American intelligence agencies, these so-called "assets", the spies on the payroll of the CIA, and drug dealers. Don't let members of Congress and the media get away with this complacency and distortion!

The war on drugs is really no war at all - it's a business!