Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. — Earl Warren
One difficulty in making the Senate work the way it was intended is that America's electorate is increasingly divided into red and blue states, with lawmakers representing just one color or the other. — Sayings
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. — Mark Twain
It is unthinkable to allow complete strangers, whether individually or collectively as state legislators or others in government, to make such personal decisions for someone else. — Sarah Weddington
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters. — Plato
We need a constitutional amendment to allow the legislature to control the so-called free speech rights of corporations. — Hank Johnson
Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations. — Diane Ravitch
If the General Government should be left dependent on the State Legislatures, it would be happy for us if we had never met in this room. — John Dickinson
We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals, and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship. — Grover Norquist
Under the benignant providence of Almighty God the representatives of the States and of the people are again brought together to deliberate for the public good. — James K. Polk
A state is a perfect body of free men, united together to enjoy common rights and advantages. — Hugo Grotius
The constitutions of Maryland and New York are founded in higher wisdom. — Ezra Stiles
Legislation can neither be wise nor just which seeks the welfare of a single interest at the expense and to the injury of many and varied interests. — Andrew Johnson
Short State Legislatures Quotes
Preserving power, rather than increasing it, is the main goal of states. —
Elected officials shouldn’t get to choose who gets to choose elected officials. — Lewis Black
The state reserves the right to be the sole interpreter of the needs of society. — Benito Mussolini
All legislation is founded upon the principle of mutual concession. — Henry Clay
The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it. — John Stuart Mill
With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law, and every time they make a law it's a joke. — Will Rogers
Defeat is a state of mind: no one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality.
State Government Quotes
No people without a government of their own can expect to be treated on the same level as people of independent sovereign states. It is far better to be free to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else . . . — Kwame Nkrumah
When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end. — Aristotle
Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience. — John Locke
Be in a state of gratitude for everything that shows up in your life. Be thankful for the storms as well as smooth sailing.
How could a state be governed, or protected in its foreign relations if every individual remained free to obey or not to obey the law according to his private opinion. — Thomas Hobbes
I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University. — William F. Buckley, Jr.
The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount…If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State. — Harry S. Truman
Paradise is not a place, its a state of mind.
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
Let our government be like that of the solar system. Let the general government be like the sun and the states the planets, repelled yet attracted, and the whole moving regularly and harmoniously in several orbits. — John Dickinson
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. — Thomas Paine
People have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back. And given what the United States Government and Western powers have done to the third world, I feel that these countries should fight back. — Yuri Kochiyama
The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people. — Walt Whitman
I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years. — Harry Shearer
Marriage has been defined by every legislature that has ever sat in the United States from every State, now 50 States, the same way, but now we have unelected judges altering and changing that fundamental institution. — Jeff Sessions
In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War. — Alexander Hamilton
Defeat is a state of mind! No one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as reality.
If laws acting upon private interests can not always be avoided, they should be confined within the narrowest limits, and left wherever possible to the legislatures of the States. — Martin Van Buren
I have introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and make it clear that the Congress and state legislatures do have the ability and the power to regulate and get corporate funding out of political campaigns. — Bernie Sanders
An infinite God ought to be able to protect Himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. — Robert Green Ingersoll
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature. — Samuel Butler
There still is a war on women in terms of politicians in Washington and the state legislatures trying to eliminate any rights we have fought to win and that the Supreme Court has afforded us. — Gloria Allred
I am unable to conceive that the state legislatures which must feel so many motives to watch, and which possess so many means of counteracting the federal legislature, would fail either to detect or to defeat a conspiracy of the latter against the liberties of their common constituencies. — James Madison
No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write, and clearly can't add. — Carl Hiaasen
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. — H. L. Mencken
We're trying to convey how much easier it is than most people think, especially young people, to turn the country around if they focus on the levers, if they focus on Congress, and state legislatures. — Ralph Nader
The appointment of senators by the state legislatures . . . is recommended by the double advantage of favoring a select appointment, and of giving to the state governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government, as must secure the authority of the former. — James Madison
We're in the hands of the state legislature and God, but at the moment, the state legislature has more to say than God. — Edward Koch
Remember that before 'Roe v. Wade' was decided, there were four states that allowed abortion in the first trimester if that's what the woman sought: New York, Hawaii, California, Alaska. Other states were shifting. And people were fighting over this issue in state legislatures. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility. — John Kenneth Galbraith
If Jehovah cannot support his religion without going into partnership with a State Legislature, I think he ought to give it up. — Robert Green Ingersoll
I cannot subscribe to the omnipotence of a State legislature. — Samuel Chase
And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you're as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here's a voucher, go sign up. — Mitch Daniels
Work can be undertaken to create an authentic independent political party, a real party, based on popular participation from the ground up, not a top-down candidate producing organization like the two official parties, working from school boards to state legislatures and beyond. Not easy in the regressive U.S. political system, but not impossible. — Noam Chomsky
... the State Legislatures will jealously and closely watch the operations of this Government, and be able to resist with more effect every assumption of power, than any other power on earth can do; and the greatest opponents to a Federal Government admit the State Legislatures to be sure guardians of the people's liberty. — James Madison
Fast food workers are all the governor has power to enact. Your state legislature is held hostage by the same nitwits that hold hostage the federal [government]. People who have confused suffocating collectivism, which is bad, for a necessity to solve collective action problems, which is what all human endeavor is based on. — Nick Hanauer
We do need curriculum reform. And it should happen at the state and local level. That is where educational policy belongs, because if a parent is unhappy with what their child is being taught in school, they can go to that local school board or their state legislature, or their governor and get it changed. — Marco Rubio
It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many. — Jonathan Swift
In the state of Michigan, where I served in the state Legislature, there was a lot of shuffling of money between one year and the other to balance the budget. — Justin Amash
For the same reason that the members of the State legislatures will be unlikely to attach themselves sufficiently to national objects, the members of the federal legislature will be likely to attach themselves too much to local objects. — James Madison
A local spirit will infallibly prevail much more in the members of Congress than a national spirit will prevail in the legislatures of the particular States. — James Madison
How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg
To strengthen the grassroots at the party - at the party unit, at the county level, at the precinct level, and then to help motivate and facilitate the local grassroots to get out there and turn out the vote and boost turn out. And then to help govern in places where we do hold city councils and state legislatures. — Keith Ellison
How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology represented by articles like this one. — Harris L Coulter
A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the state's segregation laws was democratically elected? — Martin Luther King, Jr.
An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment. — Robert Green Ingersoll
And that's the mission of The Innocence Project in New York, is to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted, and also work from a policy angle with Congress and state legislatures to prevent future wrongful convictions. — John Grisham
The Federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular, to the state legislatures. — James Madison
This partisan decision by a packed GOP state Supreme Court takes away worker's rights to bargain for a safe place to work. It underscores the need to vote for me in Aug. 12th primary. As governor, I will call a special session of the Legislature on day one to restore workers' rights, health care and retirement. — Chris Larson
I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery. — George Washington
An important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility. — John Kenneth Galbraith
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state. — Thomas Jefferson
The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war. The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted. — James Madison
No state legislature ever built a great university. — James E. Rogers
Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress. — Ken Thompson
Our original idea was to help three or four hundred candidates in the first election run for the Ohio State legislature and the California legislature around the country. — Pete du Pont
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of state legislatures quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about state legislatures to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of state legislatures quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
