Barnett "Barney" Frank (b. March 31, 1940) is an American politician who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee (2007–2011) and was a leading co-sponsor of the 2010 Dodd–Frank Act, a sweeping reform of the U.S. financial industry. Frank, a resident of Newton, Massachusetts, is considered the most prominent gay politician in the United States. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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Anyone who tells you they enjoy running in a campaign for public office is either crazy or lying to you.
Every politician is entitled to privacy, but no politician is entitled to hypocrisy.
I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people's rights to get married, join the army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.
I don't begrudge Ronald Reagan an occasional nap. We must understand it's not the dozing off of Ronald Reagan that causes us problems. It's what he does on those moments when he's awake.
I have this fear that one day there's going to be a fire in the Senate and there are only going to be 57 Senators there and they'll all die because they won't have the 60 votes to allow themselves to leave the building.
I rule out that it was an innocent mispronunciation. I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.
I will miss this job, but one of the advantages of not running for office is I don't even have to pretend to be nice to people I don't like.
I will neither be a lobbyist, nor a historian.
I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.
I've seen anti-Semitism essentially disappear in my adult life as a social and economic factor. There may be some nuts out there, but generally things are fine. I think the same thing will happen with gayness. We'll get to a point soon enough where it's not even an issue anymore. But progress can be slow. I filed my first gay rights bills in 1972 in Massachusetts. Forty years later, it would be nice to have this wrapped up and put to bed.
In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.
It is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table: I have no interest in doing it.
Moderate Republicans are reverse Houdinis. They tie themselves up in knots and then tell you they can't do anything because they're tied up in knots.
Race has been much more devastating, but there's one psychological factor (that's different): Very few black kids have ever had to worry about telling their parents that they were black.
Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.
Selling out is an overrated phenomenon. If selling out paid better, I wouldn't have to be here tonight. (at a Gridiron Dinner)
The best antidote to prejudice is reality.
The bumper sticker I'm going to have printed up for Democrats this year is, 'We're not perfect, but they're nuts.'
The issue is not that morals be applied to public policy, it's that conservatives bring public policy to spheres of our lives where it should not enter.
The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality.
The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.
The Republicans' idea of 'right to life' begins at conception and ends at birth.
There are no moderate Republicans left, with the exception of a few who would vote with us when it doesn't make any difference. It's the most rigid ideological party since before the Civil War.
There are rules of excessive civility around here to which I generally subscribe. You do need a certain amount of courtliness in the system. But that, in itself, can become a form of abuse. There are limits to when you restrain yourself from calling a fool a fool.
This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system, and it's expensive to boot.
We have a besetting sin today in our politics where people think that you show your depth of commitment to a cause by rigidity, not just by rigidity, but impugning the motives of those on your side who try to get something done.
Categories: Barney Frank, Quotes of the day
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