Jerry Brown Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

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.

Jerry Brown
The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals, Nazi-style.

Jerry Brown
The corporation is an out-of–control Frankenstein.

Jerry Brown
…not to mention the CIA which should be, I think, dissolved, it's of no use — a great source of mischief — I don't see any point to the FBI…

Jerry Brown
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.

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

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

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

Jerry Brown
That's why we have to look at the death penalty as part of a larger pattern that is inhuman.

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

Jerry Brown
The CIA was revealed to be spying in France, not for military purposes, but for corporate purposes. So this $30 billion spook agency is now at the disposal of these oligarchic corporate structures run by the 1%.

Jerry Brown
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!

Jerry Brown
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.

Jerry Brown
But the dark evil geniuses who run this country have figured out another use for these surplus people — arrest them in the war on drugs or the war on crime and put them into prison, adding to the gross domestic product!

Jerry Brown
I'd shrink government in a minute, if I could shrink GM, Bank of America, and all these immoral corporations that operate by an undemocratic code, with no soul and no conscience.

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

Jerry Brown
The big lock-up is about drugs. Here's the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners.

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

Jerry Brown
Look at the whole criminal correction game, which is a big piece of our economy. It's just an invention. Crime is being invented to put people to work.

Jerry Brown
We are in a degenerate state of self-government. In fact, even to use the words self-government, is not only an exaggeration, it's a lie. It's a big lie!

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

Jerry Brown
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.

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

Jerry Brown
When I say the U.S. Government is taking another step down the road to totalitarianism, I'm not just saying that for rhetorical effect. There is a systematic movement to extinguish the liberties of the American people.

Jerry Brown
That's another step forward in creating a nation of sheep in a totalitarian state, saying, "Yes sir, yes sir! Is that what you want? Do it to me again!" By the time they graduate, kids won't even know they have rights. They'll be little stooges for a fascist state.

Jerry Brown