Jerry Brown Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Jerry Brown

“Inaction may be the biggest form of action.”

— 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

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

— Jerry Brown

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

— 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

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

— 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

“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

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

— 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

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

— Jerry Brown

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

— 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

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

— Jerry Brown

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

— Jerry Brown

“Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.”

— Jerry Brown

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

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

— 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

“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

“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.”

— 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

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

— Jerry Brown

“Sometimes the highest form of action is inaction.”

— Jerry Brown

“-We need to become more unreasonable but in an intelligent way.”

— Jerry Brown

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

— Jerry Brown

“We're going to get that little bug before that little bug gets my poll ratings down any further.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“The farmers markets were another step to giving people an opportunity to take more power over their own lives-and also to provide another outlet for organic produce. That is important because the production and distribution of food is increasingly being monopolized and controlled by large corporate structures, large financial structures.”

— Jerry Brown

“The shuttle tomorrow is truly like laying the last spike on the transcontinental railroad, only much more so. And whether or not we're going to see in in the next 10 or 20 years, there are people alive today who will see manufacturing in space from moon materials or from asteroids.”

— Jerry Brown

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

— Jerry Brown

“As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.”

— 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

“The corporation is an out-of-control Frankenstein.”

— 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

“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.”

— 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 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