Andrew Cuomo Quotes

Robert F Kennedy was later was quoted with a similar notion. See {624825}. Voltaire preceded both by over a century {585802} . However, all three of these echo an old Russian proverb. See {615261}.

About 200 years after Voltaire made this statement, Robert F Kennedy was quoted with a similar notion. See {624825}. However, both of these echo an old Russian proverb. See {615261}.

The General wanted to make further improvements before manufacturing new assault craft.

Johnson had proposed an extremely strong civil rights bill. Most Washington insiders assumed that he would gain favor amongst fair minded whites and Blacks for making the attempt, but then he would compromise with the Southerners, and water down the bill to something that had little or no teeth. His staff were trying to learn from Johnson, which aspects of the bill he was willing to compromise on assuming that the President could never get Congress to pass the bill in its original form. They were really surprised at the President’s answer and assumed that he could not do it. They were more surprised when he did drive the bill through Congress without any substantive compromises. It was the most powerful and effective Civil Rights legislation passed since Reconstruction a century earlier.

See Robert Kennedy {624825} for a generalized statement of the problem.

See Henry Clay for an earlier expression of this point.

The interviewer asked her for an example of a piece of legislation for which she had voted that represented a compromise. She was an example of ideological politicians for whom compromise is considered an abandonment of principle. At the time, she was asked this question, not one of her pieces of legislation had ever become law. It amost always takes compromise to get enough votes to pass legislation in a democracy.

The Social Security law, most American’s favorite government program, had just been passed that year, and like the Affordable Health Care Act in the Obama administration, the Republicans were rabidly opposed to the program, and there was none of the collaboration with an objective to perfect and improve the legislative language. And like “Obama Care” and most very large new government initiatives, there were many problems that became clear once the program was started. Amazingly President Roosevelt was the first to tell the public and the press that the Social Security program will have many problems, but what does not work can be replaced by something else and the program would be improved. This was part of FDR’s basic approach to the Presidency. (See {631419}.) No politician in modern times would be able to say that or anything like it, and Mrs. Roosevelt’s quotation here, which she wrote for the entire country to see, most politicians and political scientists would agree that she was exactly right about new legislative initiative.