Barney Frank Thinking Quotations

I will tell you, I'm a lousy cook, but I think I'm a pretty good judge of a good meal.

I think there was an absolute, deep gap between consensual relations between adults, which people may like or dislike, and people who physically impose themselves on children or misuse their authority to impose on children.

If people knew of ethics violations, they should have sent them to the Ethics Committee. If you think there was serious ethics violation that ought to be looked at, you don't hold it back for retaliatory purposes.

And I think there is too much bloviating around from politicians.

And unless you think there is a serious chance you're going to jail, don't listen to your lawyer.

But on those occasions when I do strongly disagree with the Democrats and I don't say anything, I think I forfeit my right to have people pay attention to me when I say the things that I don't like about what Republicans are saying.

Particularly marijuana, I think is a great hypocrisy. I think frankly it contributes to a good deal of the sense of unfairness you have among younger people who are told they shouldn't do this because it’s got all these negative effects, but then older people are engaging in all kinds of things that probably have a greater impact on people.

In the West everybody recognizes the need for a private sector, pretty much, even the one Socialist group understands this now, and so there tends to be debate about how much public sector intervention you think is needed for a variety of reasons, and there are very important differences on party lines that should be fought out.

The people who started the American government, the founders of the Constitution, didn't like political parties but they were forced to start them. Nobody ever created political parties in England, they evolved. And there do tend to be two general tendencies that focus around how much government you think you need.

I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the Army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.

There was a degree of interventionism in American foreign policy, the notion that we must be the superpower and we have to intervene everywhere, that I think makes no sense.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

You know, when I was in college, there was a big debate: Do unions raise wages? Well, with regard to industrial unions, there were arguments back and forth -- international competition. It is now clear, I think, that whether or not you think unions raised wages 50 years ago, the absence of unions and their weakness that is inflicted by anti-union public policy depresses wages. The fact is that people who are not represented, in the service industries in particular, are the victims of policies which depress their wages.