William Sulzer Quotes

If a policy is wrongheaded, feckless and corrupt, I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.

New York State is upside down and backwards; high taxes and low performance. The New York State government was at one time a national model. Now, unfortunately, it's a national disgrace. Sometimes, the corruption in Albany could even make Boss Tweed blush.

It’s not one thing that eliminates corruption. It requires a number of factors: Education, institutions, accountability … It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort.

I don’t care what the newspapers write about me. My constituents can’t even read. But get rid of those damn pictures [political cartoons]

no political influence could save a man who deserved punishment and none could win unworthy promotion.

Whatever is a cruel wrong, Whatever is unjust, The honest years that speed along Will trample in the dust.

Time will unveil all things to posterity.

Government by three men in a room has turned New York State into a national symbol of governmental dysfunction. Enough is enough!

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.

For example, if you are a blogger who wrote something about a local official and you're going to prison for that, you're a political prisoner. If you're a businessman who has refused to cede his business to the local official and you're going to prison for that, you're not a political prisoner. In that second category there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia.

To succeed, we have to be the party of change, we have to root out corruption in our own ranks and we have to be the party of solutions.

Politicians are making deals for their benefit. Now we are going to make the deals for the American people.

All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.

Most of the time, I regard the judgment of people as a waste of time. I regard the judgment of behavior as imperative.

The idea of justice - even just dreaming of justice - is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust - and then tries to make it more accountable.

How can someone live with their own conscience when you reward a domestic terrorist with continued safety and betray the family of fallen police officer waiting for decades for justice for his murder? So let's ask the question. Hillary Clinton as a coddler of the brutal Castro brothers and betrayer of the family of fallen state trooper Werner Foerster and his family.

The insolence of time is like a blow in the face from an unseen enemy.

Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges; we cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them through ourselves.

We will meet our challenges head on and we will do it by rejecting the politics of mediocrity and corruption. You voted for change; I intend to deliver it. ... I will govern as a reformer.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

If a theology student in lowa should get up at a PTA luncheon in Sioux City and attack the President's military policy, my guess is that you would probably find it reported somewhere the next morning in the New York Times. But when 300 Congressmen endorse the President's policy, the next morning it is apparently not considered news fit to print.

The actions of those in power can have enormous consequences - a price that they themselves almost never have to pay.

They kill people here who stand up for their rights The system's just too damned corrupt It's always the same, the name of the game Is who do you know higher up

Injustice and corruption will never be transformed by keeping them hidden, but only by bringing them out into the light and confronting them with the power of love.