Jerry Brown quotes:

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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.
Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
Were I to stop oil production, we`d have to import it from Iraq and from Caracas, Venezuela or from North Dakota where the environmental standards are much lower, on trains that have already proven themselves unsafe, or by more ships that are causing significant pollution in the world. It`s just really dumb.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
It looks to me to be obvious that the whole world cannot eat an American diet.
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 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.
Organic farming is about buying out of a corrupt, illegal and dishonest system.
The government is becoming the family of last resort.
Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void.
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.
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.
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.
Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.
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.
We have to be realistic about what the state can afford, and put an end to abuses of the system that cost millions.
Inaction may be the biggest form of action.
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.
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.
The volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.
The way people are treated in them [prisons] is very similar to gulags.
We're going to get that little bug before that little bug gets my poll ratings down any further.
Taking significant amounts of carbon out of our economy without harming its vibrancy is exactly the sort of challenge at which California excels.
My principles are simple. Protect the Earth. Serve the People, and Explore the Universe
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.
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.
You're all welcome in California,
Life simply is. It follows its course. Give yourself to the moment. Let life reveal itself to you.
The reason that everybody likes planning is that nobody has to do anything.
It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.
Republican attacks are without basis, but when the Democrats attack me they're usually right.
I reject get-it-done, make-it-happen thinking. I want to slow things down so I understand others better.
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.
Check out my web site, wtp.org, to see what fast food did to 2 people in England.
Nuclear power will be the Vietnam issue of the 1980s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The great problem with government is that it never goes bankrupt.
The war on drugs is really no war at all - it's a business!
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!
Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness.
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 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.
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!
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...
Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.
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.
Sometimes the highest form of action is inaction.
At least when I was govenor, cocaine was expensive.
We're going to move left and right at the same time.
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 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.
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.
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.
There's nothing wrong with being an anarchist.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone's heard about the military-industrial complex, but they know very little about the medical-industrial complex...(in) a medical arms race...
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.
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!
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 corporation is an out-of-control Frankenstein.
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.
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.
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'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.
It's not viable' for poverty stricken developing world to emulate prosperity of U.S.
My goal in signing these [gun control ] bills is to enhance public safety by tightening our existing laws in a responsible and focused manner, while protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
California is the third largest oil producer. More importantly, California burns more oil, consumes more oil than any state or collection of states in America.
We`re not going to have a backlash. We`re going to build a consensus. And I live in the real world, not the kind of fantasy goals that we would all like, but we would never achieve if we go about it in the blunderbuss fashion that your question would assume.
Even when you sign a treaty like I think [Richard] Nixon did, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, George W. Bush reneged on it. He got out of. So any treaty can be withdrawn from.
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.

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