Jim Webb Quotes

The House of Representatives is ruled by a small group of old men.

Mr. Dingell is just plain Mr. Dingell. And when he gets to be chairman of the Commerce Committee, he doesn't let it go to his head. However, he thinks he would be a very, very good chairman.

…the Senate, a small body of egos…

The only way to get anywhere in Congress is to stay there and let seniority take its course.

The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.

I am a U.S. senator from North Carolina. I'm worried about doing the business on the Capitol Hill. I'm not going to get into the parlor games and the political discussions about a separate and co-equal branch.

In his years in Washington, Senator Kerry has been one vote of a hundred in the United States Senate - and fortunately on matters of national security he was very often in the minority.

I like the House. The House is where you can effect the most change. It's such a fast-moving dynamic body compared to the Senate.

If I only had 12 years left to live, I'd want to live it as a member of Congress because that was the 12 longest years of my life.

I don't order laws, I propose them.

To go from chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in the Kansas Legislature to one of 50 on the Appropriations Committee and one of 435 in the whole House, it is more difficult to directly impact policy here.

One of my big beliefs about Washington is that we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly underrate seeing Washington as a system, in general, but, in particular, we highly underrate the power of Congress.

Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all.

When the legislator is finally elected --- ah! then indeed does the tone of his speech undergo a radical change. The people are returned to passiveness, inertness, and unconsciousness; the legislator enters into omnipotence. Now it is for him to initiate, to direct, to propel, and to organize. Mankind has only to submit …

For the first thirty years it [the House of Representatives] was the controlling branch of the government, and the one of whose action the public eye was fixed.

[Warren] Harding didn't like being a Senator; he liked being in the Senate.

Congress has a lot of powers which people, especially those in the executive branch, don't like to talk about.

The people never have and never will be able to understand how the will of a majority of the House of Representatives can be set aside by the judgment of a few men on a powerful committee.

Being Speaker [of the House] is hard work.

The Congress is getting too powerful.

The difference between being a member of the House and being a member of the Senate is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit.

Bureaucrats understand who their real masters are. Their real masters are not their nominal department heads. The real powers are the chairmen on Capitol Hill.

Those most adjacent to the seat of legislation will always possess advantages over others.

I already belong to a very exclusive club. It's called the U. S. Senate.

As Chairman of the [House] Ways and Means Committee, I can contact the President whoever he may be, quite readily on the telephone. As a Vice President, I don't know whether he'd listen to me or not.