Dan Webster Quotes

Governments propose, and oppositions dispose.

If we’re going to do all the things that the Constitution says that legitimately we can do as a country, … we have to be able to have a Congress where people can talk together like our Founding Fathers did.

I will continue to ask the president and his subordinates to work with Congress rather than against it.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

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

All legislation is founded upon the principle of mutual concession.

It's harder to pass a law than stop one.

Do you know what it takes to get a good piece of legislation passed ... one that everyone agrees on? The egos. The turf battles.... It's incredible.

You can't write laws in America if you don't compromise.

Prime Minister’s Question time is very different from anything in America. It is something that fortunately your President does not have to face.

Every law enacted by the General Assembly shall embrace but one subject.

In the United States almost every political question becomes a legal question—or at least a question with legal dimensions.

… legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.

I am president of Congress, not the director of an insane asylum.

Governing is about selecting.

Large sustainable measures are seldom built on slim majorities.

We have a constitution that says that the way you get things is by passing legislation, not by threatening to destroy the country unless you get your way.

Let us give our Republic not the best possible laws but the best which they will bear.

Legislation is the art of compromise.

A politician’s task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.

Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation. Without a single committee hearing we are being asked to vote on that 484 pages. They think we will all go along with it. I read in the paper that nobody will have the courage to vote against it. Well, Robert Byrd is going to vote against it because I don't know what I am voting for.

The legislative agenda reflects the complication of society.

A system that is built on checks and balances does not do well in an ideological climate.

Our system of checks and balances makes it simpler to stop bills than enact them.

When you get into an airplane, you expect a pilot who knows how to fly. Running a Government is also an expertise.