Mark Steyn Quotes

In 1972, I signed a union card for SEIU. And for the last 38 years, 14 as president, it's been my life. I've seen the most miraculous, spectacular things. But there's a time to learn, a time to lead and a time to leave.

I did my first apprenticeship when I was 15, then joined the union when I was 17. I worked every summer in high school and college.

Hey, I'm a former union president myself and also an attorney that represented a lot of unions.

In order to work for Chrysler, you are required to join the union, in this case UAW. There's no choice - it's a union shop - the employees voted to have it that way, and in America, that's the way it is.

As long as Detroit [the auto companies] was making money, it was always easy for us to accept union demands and recoup them later in the form of price increases. The alternative was to take a strike and risk ruining the company.

The decline of the trade union is to some extent inevitable and irreversible.

Stop demonizing American workers who don't belong to unions who are happy in their jobs.

I'd also remind people, if I were running for Presidency, that a long-term problem facing the budget is Social Security and Medicare.

The people who are making you feel under attack is your union leadership, and they're doing it for politically intense reasons.

[Ronald] Reagan bitterly hated unions and wanted them destroyed. This began with the air controllers' strike and went on from there.

There is a growing consensus that the European systems have worked better than the American: They have been able to deliver better health care to more people at lower cost.

The importation of foreigners into a country that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for subsistence will bear, will be in the end no increase of people, unless the new comers have more industry and frugality than the natives, and then they will provide more subsistence, and increase in the country; but they will gradually eat the natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in foreigners to fill up any occasional vacancy in a country for such vacancy will soon be filled by natural generation.

Other paths would include making nuclear fission cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it, so that could be scaled up.

I'm proud of my record of negotiating agreements, representing people and making sure that both employers and employees could get the best out of going to work every day.

When I first did the book on gasoline stations, people would look at it and say, Are you kidding or what? Why are you doing this? In a sense, that's what I was after: I was after the head-scratching.

When I talk about how we're going to pay for education, how we're going to invest in infrastructure, how we're going to get the cost of prescription drugs down, and a lot of the other issues that people talk to me about all the time, I've made it very clear we are going where the money is. We are going to ask the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share.

Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.

Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.

As long as there are big corporations, there will be big unions. The economic power of big business will be matched by the economic power of the big unions.

We will cover those folks that are on ObamaCare that need to be covered, but at the same time, we're going to find ways to lower prices, allow people to choose better doctors, and have a lot more freedom when it comes to health care.

Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians" ... Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons ... This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.

I hate people. People make me pro-nuclear.

Obamacare needs the premiums of healthier people to cover the costs of sicker people. It's a devious con that can only be described as insurance.

Every American has got to recognize, we are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee health care to all people. We pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs because the pharmacy, the pharmaceutical industry is out of control ripping us off.

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.