Jimmy Breslin Quotes

Everyone in Washington knows what needs to be done. They just don’t do it because there’s always someone else they can blame.

The government never does anything successfully.

Visit USA.gov and you'll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.

Mexico is a competent, strong state. A little corrupt here and there, a little ineffective here and there, but a strong state.

I have found in my years of working in the government than when I face a choice of explanations of venality or incompetence in explaining some government activities, it is almost always incompetence that explains it. It often appears to be venality because we do not realize how incompetent government and large private organizations can be sometimes.

Government on its own is always inefficient.

The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence.

We're being taken advantage of because we have leaders who are incompetent. They don't even know. When I went out and told them you know in their trade deal they didn't even discuss the devaluation, they didn't even discuss it. At least they started discussing it, only because of me.

Our government has become incompetent, unresponsive, corrupt. And that incompetence, ineptitude, lack of accountability is now dangerous.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

Congress does two things well: nothing and overreacting.

Talk about threats to national security -- how about government so big, so complicated and so unmanageable, it cant get out of its own way?

Government isn't a good way to solve problems ... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. ... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. ... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame.

Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost! (96)

There's nothing to Obama - nothing but platitudes. When it's time to get to the substance, we get contradictions and confusions. We don't think that he knows what he's talking about because it's true: He doesn't.

The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.

He who is good at excuses is generally good for nothing else.

Competence doesn't seem like a big deal until you are forced to realize that your own government has none.

Well, it is alarming to have a president [Reagan] who doesn't know what he is doing.

You vote yourselves salaries out of the public funds and care only for your own personal interests; hence the state limps along.

As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and are self-serving.

I think my father was sick of being on the sidelines watching a bunch of incompetents in his mind. And in our world, in our business world, these people wouldn't last five minutes in real companies, and he's sick of them making decisions that are costing our children, their children behind them, trillions of dollars and really giving up the great power that we've built up over the last 200 years.

In Texas, we do not hold high expectations for the [governor's] office; it's mostly been occupied by crooks, dorks and the comatose.

My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn't you.