Bill Clinton Quotes

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

We passed welfare reform. All of you know I believe we were right to do it.

While the rest of the country is still talking about welfare reform, Texas is implementing it.

When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

Welfare reform isn't easy.

At its core, government welfare is predicated on a false compassion.

The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.

We shouldn't turn the safety net into a hammock. It should actually be a safety net.

You know where nice people end up? On welfare.

Even [Bill] Clinton ran on my program of "workfare instead of welfare." Of which I was the first American politician, starting in 1989, who brought that up. And that helped him get elected.

We will not cut one penny from the safety net until we've cut every penny from corporate welfare.

Speaker Newt Gingrich says that what is wrong with the present system is not that people abuse welfare but that welfare abuses people.

The US, for historical reasons, mistrusts the concept of a welfare state, and this mistrust shows itself nakedly under present US government, which commits uncounted billions of the national wealth to what it calls defence, and is close-fisted in giving money to plans which would ameliorate the grinding poverty of a great part of its people. Quite simply, in Canada you could not get away with that.

What...can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.

Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?

After all, Bill Clinton is the guy that signed welfare reform.

I don't believe in welfare.

Ten years ago, Republicans decided it was time to reform our broken welfare system and give welfare recipients the tools they needed to escape the system and build a better life.

In the past, the public assistance programs have been too much concerned with the mere dispatching of monthly checks. … it is high time that some concerted effort be made to get people off the rolls who can sustain themselves.

Drug testing for recipients of various welfare programs - I really think that's something that needs to be considered.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

I understand welfare because I lived it. I understand the difference between a want and a need. The Republican Party promised to bring welfare change. We must deliver on this promise.

I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No.

There is much in American society which I admire, but I have long held the view that the absence of an effective safety net in that country means that too many needy citizens fall by the wayside. That is not the path that Australia will tread. Nor do we want the burdens of nanny state paternalism that now weigh down many economies in Europe.