Jerry Brown Short Quotes

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The corporation is an out-of–control Frankenstein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerry Brown
Some of the same rhetoric used by the law-and-order crowd has been used by authoritarian states over and over again.

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 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 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
…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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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