Political Quotes

“And the difference is, if the gentleman will continue to yield, Mr. Speaker, it strikes me that in the 1930s and the 1940s the leaders of the world had a fair amount of confidence in the people that they served. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had a certain belief that the people they served were capable of rising to the occasion and that they would respond to candor and common sense. Sometimes in this television sound-bite era that we live in, we do not have enough confidence in the people of our country. We have a mind-set that we cannot tell the people in our country full information, and that we cannot let them know a commitment may be a long one because they may not have faith. We cannot let them know the money is going to be three times what we say it is because they may not have faith. We cannot let them know all of these uncertainties because we fear they may not have faith. I have spent a fair amount of time in my life trying cases before juries, and I have won them and I have lost them; but I can confidently tell Members that every jury that I have ever appeared in front of I felt did the right thing in terms of what the facts were, whether it was what I advocated or not. I have that same kind of faith in the American people, that if we tell the American people the facts, I have confidence in our ability to apply those facts to policy and to apply our values to those policies; and maybe we need more of a sense of confidence.…”