Joseph R. Biden Jr. Quotes

As a government leader, I'm not going to sit on the sidelines and watch all these other sectors innovate. I'm going to do everything I can as a leader to be in that innovation, to be a provocateur for that innovation.

I think the understanding of the role of markets has really helped advance the values of entrepreneurship. It's helped shape public policy discussions in a whole variety of ways.

It is absolutely clear that government plays a key role, as a catalyst, in promoting long-run growth.

Throughout U.S. history, competent public investments have been an essential complement to private investments - from the Louisiana Purchase, to land-grant colleges, to the Interstate Highway System, to the Internet.

Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption.

We regard the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress.

I think the state’s role in the evolution of technology is best aimed at fueling adventures of the mind into the impossible reaches. That is very long range, and it’s the sort of thing that almost no companies have the wherewithal to contemplate.

Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity; not stifle it.

Government exists to create and preserve conditions in which people can translate their ideas into practical reality. In the best of times, much is lost in translation. But we try.

Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporations of ideas- not only the ideas of an Edison or a Ford but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary.

Manufacturing establishments not only occasion a positive augmentation of the produce and revenue of the society . . . they contribute essentially to rendering them greater than they could possibly be, without such establishments. These circumstances are . . . greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions which discriminate men from each other.

On the day a country decides not to invest a cent in innovation, discovery or exploration, that country decides to be a tributary to others.

When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.

Mentioning Jesus in your speech: Small government. Doing what Jesus asked: Big government.

We do not run government on whims of an individual, our progress is reforms driven, our reforms are policy driven and our policies are people driven.

The one factor that you can't find on a spreadsheet is the willingness of the people in government to lead change, And in Denmark every single one of them is engaged and willing to do whatever it takes to get Denmark to be a leader in electric vehicles.

Ronald Reagan came from show business. His idea of how the government should help the homeless was like your agent. "We'll try to get you work. But don't bug us about it."

Though the profusion of Government must undoubtedly have retarded the natural progress of England to wealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it.

There are lots of other things that affect state growth besides state taxes. However, the reason I look at taxes is because these are policy variables that can be changed by state governments in order to get better results than they otherwise had.

Companies want to innovate. Companies that don't innovate wither on the vine. The connection between STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and the financial stability of a nation is what needs to established.

We in government should learn to look at our country with the eyes of the entrepreneur, seeing possibilities where others see only problems

In our complex world, there cannot be fruitful initiative without government, but unfortunately there can be government without initiative.

We know that we have to have the right combinations of government policies and private sector energy and dynamism. Getting that balance right is what I know President Obama has tried to do, and at every turn he's been stopped.

Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.

My great objective as a parliamentarian was to dramatise the deficiencies and devise practical government programs to deal with them. It was a cause that went to the heart of our way of life.