Jerry Brown 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

That's another step forward in creating a nation of sheep in a totalitarian state, saying, "Yes sir, yes sir! Is that what you want? Do it to me again!" By the time they graduate, kids won't even know they have rights. They'll be little stooges for a fascist state.

He's totally into power.

The corporation is an out-of–control Frankenstein.

Jerry Brown was just a nut.

[Jerry Brown is] a desperate man.

There's nothing wrong with being an anarchist.

Jerry has given hypocrisy a bad name.

Jerry has no political or ideological anchor.

That man [Jerry] is like 500 pounds of Jello.

Jerry is perceived by most legislators as very selfish.

I do not believe he believes what he is saying.

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

He's very ambitious and will do anything to be in power.

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

I don't think you can take much of what he says seriously.

The governor is the worst administrator ever to come down the pike.

I don't like to talk about Jerry Brown. I don't like him.

I don't think Jerry Brown is committed to anything but Jerry Brown.

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

I listened, and I've come to the conclusion I just don't trust him.

I don't know who Jerry Brown is anymore. There's been so many evolvements.

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

He is by an order of magnitude the most self-absorbed politician I have ever dealt with.

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

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

[Jerry Brown] is the most self-serving, inept politician that I have ever met in my 35 years in politics.

Oftentimes Jerry will run for an office and not want to do the things that are part of that office.

I've been in office and I've been out of office. And if I were to choose, I'd rather be in office.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

…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…

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals, Nazi-style.

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.

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!

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.

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!