Top 94 Quotes & Sayings by Jerry Brown

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American politician Jerry Brown.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 34th and 39th governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and 2011 to 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected Secretary of State of California in 1970; Brown later served as Mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007 and Attorney General of California from 2007 to 2011. He was both the oldest and sixth-youngest governor of California due to the 28-year gap between his second and third terms. Upon completing his fourth term in office, Brown became the third longest-serving governor in U.S. history, serving 16 years and 5 days in office.

American - Politician | Born: April 7, 1938

Source: Wikipedia

Several unions have agreed to larger employee contributions for their members. Taxpayers are living with cuts and making sacrifices to deal with the reality of California's budget crisis, state workers are going to have to do the same.

Jerry Brown

Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I'm talking about welfare for all. Without it, you're going to have warfare for all.

Jerry Brown

Pension reform can be hard to talk about. In the long run, reform now means fewer demands for layoffs and less draconian measures in the future. It's in the best interest of all Californians to fix this system now.

Jerry Brown

We have to deal with where we are. We have to create cooperatives, we have to create intentional communities, we have to work for local cooperation where we are.

Jerry Brown

Inaction may be the biggest form of action.

Jerry Brown

When the farmer can sell directly to the consumer, it is a more active process. There's more contact. The consumer can know, who am I buying this from? What's their name? Do they have a face? Is the food they are selling coming out of Mexico with pesticides?

Jerry Brown

Multinational corporations do control. They control the politicians. They control the media. They control the pattern of consumption, entertainment, thinking. They're destroying the planet and laying the foundation for violent outbursts and racial division.

Jerry Brown

We have to be realistic about what the state can afford, and put an end to abuses of the system that cost millions.

Jerry Brown

The reason that everybody likes planning is that nobody has to do anything.

Jerry Brown

I like computers. I like the Internet. It's a tool that can be used. But don't be misled into thinking that these technologies are anything other than aspects of a degenerate economic system.

Jerry Brown

It looks to me to be obvious that the whole world cannot eat an American diet.

Jerry Brown

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

Jerry Brown

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

Jerry Brown

Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.

Jerry Brown

Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.

Jerry Brown

In some cases, managers and employees have secured pensions beyond their original base salary. It is wrong, the people doing it know it's wrong, and we have to put an end to it.

Jerry Brown

Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we're all in it together. It'll work when there's a shared sense of destiny. It can be done!

Jerry Brown

We have to restore power to the family, to the neighborhood, and the community with a non-market principle, a principle of equality, of charity, of let's-take-care-of-one-another. That's the creative challenge.

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 great problem with government is that it never goes bankrupt.

Jerry Brown

It's not viable' for poverty stricken developing world to emulate prosperity of U.S.

Jerry Brown

America will be disadvantaged, just like Detroit was disadvantaged when they couldn't build smaller cars in the '70s or '80s. The world shifts.

Jerry Brown

The volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.

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

The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs. This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.

Jerry Brown

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

Jerry Brown

Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.

Jerry Brown

When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.

Jerry Brown

I will defend everybody, every man, woman and child who's come to California for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.

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

Organic farming is about buying out of a corrupt, illegal and dishonest system.

Jerry Brown

America and the world is not yet on the proper trajectory.

Jerry Brown

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

Jerry Brown

This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system.

Jerry Brown

Check out my web site, wtp.org, to see what fast food did to 2 people in England.

Jerry Brown

Life simply is. It follows its course. Give yourself to the moment. Let life reveal itself to you.

Jerry Brown

I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.

Jerry Brown

After years of struggle, the U.S. Supreme Court today has made same-sex marriage a reality in California ... I have directed the California Department of Public Health to advise the state's counties that they must begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in California

Jerry Brown

President Trump is boldly moving in what I would call rather extreme directions. And that is going to set into motion a reaction, and it already has... He builds the strength on the other side to combat climate change.

Jerry Brown

I understand we have to keep a significant amount of fossil fuel in the ground. I`m committed to that. But I`m not going to just all of a sudden try to stop the cars of California or to increase dramatically the number of ships carrying oil into the state when we already have our own production.

Jerry Brown

I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.

Jerry Brown

Nuclear power will be the Vietnam issue of the 1980s.

Jerry Brown

You've got the oil companies fighting Pope Francis. Fighting the scientists of the world. Fighting the governor of California. They are engaged in literally a life-and-death struggle, and I have no doubt who is going to be the victor.

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

Basically, if you have above-average intelligence, you have common sense and you can speak in front of a camera and to a crowd, you can govern the state.

Jerry Brown

?We need to become more unreasonable but in an intelligent way.

Jerry Brown

If you say the world is totally dependent on oil in many parts of the world, coal and certainly natural gas, we are fossil fuel, that is modernity, modernity has two elements: individualism and oil. Now to move toward a more enlightened sustainable world, we have to transform with lots of technology, with even differences in the way we see the world and how we live in the world. That`s going to take decades.

Jerry Brown

Taking significant amounts of carbon out of our economy without harming its vibrancy is exactly the sort of challenge at which California excels.

Jerry Brown

Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void.

Jerry Brown

You're all welcome in California.

Jerry Brown

I would like to maximize the level of human choice in the medical field...The choice of a treatment in many ways is like the exercise of religion.

Jerry Brown

"Jobs for every American" is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I'm talking about welfare for all. Without it, you're going to have warfare for all.

Jerry Brown

There's nothing wrong with being an anarchist.

Jerry Brown

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

Jerry Brown

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

Jerry Brown

Everyone's heard about the military-industrial complex, but they know very little about the medical-industrial complex...(in) a medical arms race.

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

My principles are simple. Protect the Earth. Serve the People, and Explore the Universe

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

We're going to move left and right at the same time.

Jerry Brown

Top 94 Quotes & Sayings by Jerry Brown

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