Bernie Sanders Quotes

I'm asking regular folks to be my super PAC.

The first thing you need to run for President is a budget of around $20 million dollars a day.

Congressman are spending too much time raising money.

Let's face it, the subject of campaign finance is not always scintillating. But it's incredibly important.

There were 14,000 people at the rally for the president in Ohio. There were another 8,000 people in Virginia. If all 22,000 of those people opened their wallets and gave $1,000 each, that would be less than one donation from a billionaire to the super PACs. And that's why he's in for the fight of his life.

A CBS spokesman said the network's policy was tightened in September 2006 to forbid contributions to political campaigns. Previously, there was a bit of wiggle room.

For Randy Neugebauer, the Texas Republican who chairs the investigations subcommittee, the top sources of funding for his 2012 reelection campaign are from the insurance, banking, finance, securities and real estate industries.

We have to have campaign contributions to apprise the public about our qualifications.

A congressman serves a two year term. As soon as he gets elected, he has to start attending fund raisers.

We have to keep the old man’s money coming into the campaign but keep him out of it.

Money is the mother's milk of politics

Until the 1980s, candidates spent a fraction of their time talking to donors; just a few weeks a year, a little more right before an election. True, they'd fund raise from the wealthy interests, as they do now, but it was a minuscule part of their job: policy and constituent services were the heart of the work.

I contribute to public candidate campaigns, and there's a federal limit on how much you can contribute to each individual candidate. I obey the law in that regard, and I feel like I'm doing it properly.

We have to talk about the way we finance campaigns.

Let me thank the 2 1/2 million Americans who helped fund our campaign with an unprecedented 8 million individual campaign contributions. Anyone know what that average contribution was? That's right, $27.

Well, the elected officials in both parties are receiving campaign contributions and support through electioneering communications from groups that aren't technically affiliated with the campaigns, but really are. That's the off-the-books financing of electioneering communications that's going on.

Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. The natural thing would be to suggest money on the right [wing] doesn't really matter that much. The first thing you have to know is that the presidential elections are the ones where it's most difficult for money to hold sway, in that they're the most public elections.

As one [Jeb] Bush supporter told Politico, you might as well light all of this money [for election compaign] on fire.

There can be no clearer indication of how undemocratic the way we finance campaigns is than the fact that only one-quarter of 1% donate $200 or more, and only one-tenth of 1% gives $1,000 or more.

Politicians who are willing to spend too much are the ones who get reelected.

We calculate the amount spent [by Brethren and other anti- Green groups] was between $500,000 and $1 million - that's a huge amount for a state election campaign in Tasmania.

In the United States 95% of the people who win elections have the most money. That's it. So, money is a big part of elections. But that happens all the time.

Big money tries to purchase its own agenda. Money does too much talking in Washington. Every senator, every representative, even the president awakens each morning with a number in his head that will drive the whole day. The number is the amount of money that must [be] raised that day for his reelection. If he fails, the next day's number will be even higher.

John Kerry is busy trying to raise money right now for his campaign. It was reported today that Kerry's hoping to raise $80 million before the Democratic convention. That's a lot of money. Yeah, Kerry has two ways to raise the $80 million: soliciting Democratic donors and going through his wife's purse.

I think the presidency is a bad way to measure the effective campaign finance, because in the presidency, there is so much publicity, there's so much money floating around.