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

Jerry Brown
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.

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
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
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
The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It's a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist system that is breaking down.

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

Jerry Brown
The sovereignty of America has just been eroded in plain daylight by Clinton and the Congress, who take an oath to the Constitution. Those criminals continue to destroy this country and the world itself.

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
A lot of street crime is horrible, but in terms of the dislocation, the undermining of the family — the corporate criminals, many of whom reside in Congress and the White House — are getting away literally with murder.

Jerry Brown
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.

Jerry Brown
The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government.

Jerry Brown
The war on drugs is really no war at all — it's a business!

Jerry Brown
We're being ripped off and screwed by a bunch of liars, thieves, crooks, and criminals, and they're not the folks below. Don't look in the streets; look in the corporate suites!

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

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

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

Jerry Brown
Let's draw the boundary early not wait until it's obvious like Hitler's Germany and insist that the state shall never, never, take the life of a person!

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

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

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
We've got to back up here and say it's not okay. It's not okay even to kill guilty people.

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
…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