Top 1200 Campaign Contributions Quotes & Sayings

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

The kind of corruption the media talk about, the kind the Supreme Court was concerned about, involves the putative sale of votes in exchange for campaign contributions.

The primary source of waste in government is that legislators are often under heavy pressure to vote for projects that will benefit their campaign contributors, even when those projects fail a simple cost-benefit test. But with the Supreme Court showing little interest in permitting tighter rules on campaign contributions in recent years, there is little reason to be optimistic that we'll start curbing this kind of waste any time soon.

Well, the elected officials in both parties are receiving campaign contributions and support through electioneering communications from groups that aren't technically affiliated with the campaigns, but really are. That's the off-the-books financing of electioneering communications that's going on.

As a consequence, the Court ruled that the limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment, but it accepted the $1,000 limit on individual contributions on the ground that the need to avoid the appearance of corruption justified this limited constraint on speech.

The case may very well be that Congress is willing to restrict campaign contributions because it has these privileges. It is true that incumbents normally get larger contributions than their challengers. The opponents at least get some money, but they do not have access to the perquisites of the incumbent.

The next Republican that will win will campaign in the Latino community, will campaign amongst Asian-Americans, will campaign in the black churches, will campaign in college campuses.

Without putting the brakes on out-of-control campaign contributions from individuals and corporations - it will be business as usual, with 1 percent of Americans pulling the strings.

If everyone in America agreed that 80 percent of their contributions for House, Senate, and president could only come from people making contributions of $100 or less, we'd have a pretty darn good system. The influence of money would be gone.

It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.

Who do you think controls the Republican Party? Big money controls the Republican Party. This is where their campaign contributions come from.

Whenever the media asked me how much I have received in campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, my unapologetic answer was, 'Not enough.'

After all, Wall Street is clearly the most powerful lobbying force on Capitol Hill. From 1998 through 2008, the financial sector spent over $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to deregulate Wall Street.

The lobbying over China most favored nation trading status was disgusting. There's no way in hell that MFN would have passed in '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, 2000 if all these companies hadn't come in flooding and making campaign contributions and ask for people's support. That drove the debate. Every year was the allure of corporate dollars flooding into members' bank accounts.

Let's talk about why, in the 1990s, Wall Street got deregulated. Did it have anything to do with the fact that Wall Street provided - spent billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions? Well, some people might think, yeah, that had some influence.

People looking into Barack Obama's campaign contributions say that Obama may have received $3.3 million from abroad. Yeah. It turns out that broad is Oprah Winfrey.

Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government's justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over and over again those campaign contributions through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing.

I hold myself to a very high standard, and I hold my contributions to that same high standard. I will not accept any contributions that are illegal, inappropriate or tainted.

What 'eminent domain' laws mean in practice is that politicians have a right to seize your property and turn it over to someone else, in order to gain campaign contributions and win votes.

I just think the most important aspect in being able to have a productive relationship between the teachers' unions and the districts and the states that they're dealing with is that the person sitting across the table from them should not have received the largest campaign contributions from the teachers' union itself.

We need to put limits on how much an individual, group or business can spend on influencing an individual legislator or a whole set of legislators. Look at the vast sums that the NRA spends on getting all legislators to be soft on gun control. Legislators find it hard to refuse the NRA's largess when they need contributions to their political campaign wherever they can get them.

Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it. New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it's also our economic center. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy.

The Time's Up campaign is for everyone, in all capacities, contributions big and small.

Most successful American politicians look well-fed on endorsements, campaign contributions and chicken dinners.

I think there is an overwhelming support for campaign finance reform, and that includes conservatives and Republicans. Where the problem is is with the leadership; with the politicians who are benefiting from the big campaign contributions, and the dark money in the electioneering communications and so forth.

Anyhow, all mankind's ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.

The top group of fundraisers for Mr. Obama raised $457,834 for his 2008 campaign - and were approved for federal grants and loans of $11.4 billion, according to the Government Accountability Institute. Selling access to the federal treasury has been a great way for Democrats to raise campaign funds. Since 1989, according to an analysis by Gateway Pundit, big donors have provided $416 million more in direct contributions to Democrats than Republicans.

I'd like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions.

Now, the Clinton campaign, you must understand something about the Clintons, and it's true of [Barack] Obama, and it's true of most Democrats. They are always in campaign mode. Even after they win elections, they stay in campaign mode in terms of how they reach people.

But please know, whether you believe campaign contributions are speech or property, that I learned to love very dearly the right of free expression when I lived without that freedom for a while a long time ago.

Super PACs and a corrupt campaign finance system are destroying American democracy. We're proud that we have received four million individual contributions, more than any candidate in American history at this point.

The job of the director is to make certain that the film has one voice and a sense of a single vision, even though it's produced by a large number of people making contributions - to turn all those contributions from individual voices into one coherent one.

The people of New Hampshire want someone in the U.S. Senate with clear, concise views on terrorism. They'll judge a congressman based on the people he associates with, his voting record, and his campaign contributions.

From campaign contributions to expensive perks paid for by special interests, wealthy donors and corporate special interests have increasingly been able to purchase influence and promote their agendas in Congress.

Well, Trump campaign is not an actor. Trump campaign is the official campaign of the president.

Research who your politicians are, even; know what they do, know who they're supported by legislatively, and know who is supporting them financially for their campaigns. Because ever since Citizens United, we've seen a massive growth in the amount of campaign contributions and corruption in politics as a result, and that has to change.

From 1976, Judy to 1996, we had six presidential elections. And it was run under the Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1974. In all six of them, every candidate agreed to limits of what he could collect in contributions and what he could spend in seeking a nomination. And they all abided by it.

As a former presidential campaign manager, I remember the final week of the campaign as being the longest and most important week of the campaign. The week doesn't seem to end.

Women offer unique contributions to making and keeping peace - and that those contributions lead to better outcomes not just for women, but for entire societies.

Yes, prudently invested contributions to the Social Security fund may bring greater dividends, but those contributions would also face a greater risk. It would be like gambling. We should not gamble with the investments and the future of the citizens of this land.

We have to go to those countries and we have to ask them to make contributions that are greater than the contributions they're making right now. You know, we're going to protect them, we're going to remain loyal to them, but at the same time it's a two-way street. They have to help us also.

Just as somebody who lived through that campaign, I do believe that there was probably collusion. At least between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks... The Trump campaign was just way too ready to jump on whatever leak happened each day.

Let me thank the 2 1/2 million Americans who helped fund our campaign with an unprecedented 8 million individual campaign contributions. Anyone know what that average contribution was? That's right, $27.

Ultimately, the question of campaign contributions will be decided by the public.

Public disclosure of campaign contributions and spending should be expedited so voters can judge for themselves what is appropriate.

The usual test under the Federal Election Campaign Act for whether something counts as a campaign expenditure is whether the obligation would have existed but for the campaign. If so, it is not a campaign expenditure.

Why would the Obama campaign officials oppose any effort to ensure the legitimacy of a campaign contribution? It's the same reason they oppose voter ID laws. The Obama campaign evidently believes that election fraud and campaign finance fraud are permissible tools for the purpose of retaining power.

This is what oligarchy looks like: Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent makes more than 40 percent of all campaign contributions. The billionaire class owns the political system and reaps the benefits from it.

Once I got into politics, I saw the real fight, where big money controls everything, and where politicians care more about campaign contributions than the people they're supposed to represent.

What does a political revolution look like? It means that 80 percent of the people vote in national elections, not 40 percent. It means that billionaires can't make unlimited campaign contributions and buy and sell politicians. It means that the U.S. government represents the needs of all the people, not just the 1 percent and their lobbyists.

The problem with every American candidate regarding the presidency, I am not talking only about this campaign or elections, but generally, that they say something during the campaign and they do the opposite after the campaign.

Part of the reality is it's a much longer campaign, but everybody is faced with the same campaign limits as if it was a 36-day campaign.

The only way you do anything is to become really active. And the most effective way to get your message to your elected representatives is to make campaign contributions and develop relationships with them.

For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.

We have two and half million individual campaign contributions, more than any campaign in history.

Climate change is real, and the fossil fuel industry is pouring tons and tons of money into campaign contributions. That's something to be angry about.

When you are a coordinated partner, you are, in effect, on the campaign staff. You can talk to the whole staff and have virtually no limits on what you can discuss and strategize around. When you are an independent friend of the campaign, you are not allowed to strategize with the campaign on their political decisions.

Charlie Christians' contributions to the electric guitar are as big as Thomas Edisons' contributions to the world.

The role of campaign contributions in our political system and the role of lobbyists have now reached levels that are quite unhealthy for the operations of our democracy. But the antidote, as in past eras of lobbyist excess, is for more involvement by citizens to build pressure on members of the House and Senate to serve the public interest.