Hillary Clinton Quotes

Government should steer, not row.

I have 15 years of executive experience as a big-city mayor and as a governor.

A stronger focus on quality public policymaking and less distraction of personalities would be a sufficient and important contribution I can make.

The job of government is to govern. They ought to get on with it.

Good government

If you want to govern the nation, you should first be able to govern San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.

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.

Running a business is not the same as being president of the United States.

When it comes to consideration of how to do well in running the city, which must proceed entirely through justice and soundness of mind.

The Administration of the United States is such dread I almost feel paralyzed.

Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.

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

[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

That is one of the reasons why we have raised this matter about the need to focus quite sharply on the function of local government, but also on the resourcing of local government. Because it may very well be that we say to local government, you have got to run an indigent policy.

I don't think we do a great job in America any more of distinguishing between campaigns and governance. We live in an environment that's all campaign all of the time and it's helpful, now that we've moved beyond a campaign and an election to get into a governance posture.

Donald Trump has done more for getting people to understand the importance of public policy that respond to public needs in an affirmative way than anything we could have done on our own.

Government should do a few things, and do them right

As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way, but only on behalf of those who can pay. Government aid and philanthropy channel our caring for those who can't pay. But to provide rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

A government is one that thinks and hears the voice of the poor. A government must live for the poor.

One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.

Campaigning is different from governing.

I'm not running for president to be somebody, I'm running for president to do something!

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.

I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader's ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow.