Alain C. Enthoven Quotes

Where the public money runs deepest the hogs fight each other to get their snouts in the trough, and the big trough nowadays runs through the Pentagon.

The military pork barrel spreads special privilege far beyond the confines of the arms contractors; it directly creates at least two million industrial jobs, every holder of which is all too dependent for his well-being on the well-being of the party oligarchs and the success of their corrupt policies. By virtue of the military budget, a large number of ordinary citizens have been given a direct stake in corrupt power.

The defense budget is more than a piggy bank for people who want to get busy beating swords into pork barrels.

The Military Industrial Complex. President Eisenhower had it wrong. It’s the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.

The Pig Book

I view roads as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State

Taxpayers are burdened with so-called defense spending that is used not for defense, but to create or hold jobs in someone's congressional district, or to continue to pile up profits for an arms manufacturer.

The host of contractors, speculators, stockjobbers, and lobby members which haunt the halls of Congress, all desirous ... to get their arm into the public treasury, are sufficient to alarm every friend of this country. Their progress must be arrested.

Congressmen have their noses right in the trough and they're slurping it up for their districts at the expense of all the taxpayers.

Pork is the most visible malady of Congress from the public point of view.

The President is going around the country handing out so much pork that the Agriculture Department is going to have to station a meat inspector on board Air Force One.

In Congress, it's all pork, all the time.

Sooner or later you have to reach down into that old pork barrel.

We all have to pay when powerful members of Congress work to bring home the bacon.

The root of most all problems we have today is the uncontrollable appetite of politicians in Washington to dish it out.

I'm sick and tired - and the American people are sick and tired - of the pork barrel spending.

I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business.

Two million dollars is only small when you're talking about Washington, D.C.

The earmark favor factory needs to be boarded up and demolished, not turned over to new management that may or may not have a better eye for earmarks with 'merit.'

George W. Bush is a big spender…. When Congress sends up a bill with big. fat, crackling pork, he says, “Where’s the barbecue sauce?”

Patronage cements parties. Those caviling against corruption are principally moralistic muckrakers who were never closely allied to the entrepreneurial spirit

We can always find money for what the military wants.

The wonder of this month's military procurement scandal is that it can still scandalize us. The practices that are being exposed—the revolving door between government and industry, the mutual backscratching between the military and the companies that build the weapons—aren't abuses of the system. They are the system.

Some members of congress have dealt so long with the military and with the defense contractors that they begin to think they are without faults.

What chiefly governs the military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.