Michael Moore Quotes

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

We’re going to the same people. Virtually all of my major donors are the same as their [the Democratic National Committee] major donors …. I can never compete with the President of the United States or the First Lady.

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.

Hillary Clinton is totally controlled by Wall Street and all these people that gave her millions.

It's all about raising more money. And they have to keep this alive, so Hillary [Clinton] got cheated.

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

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.

Remember, the first presidential candidate to reject public financing for both the primary and general election was... Barack Obama, in 2008. He did it, in spite of a flat pledge to the contrary, because his campaign saw that it could vastly outspend John McCain.

It is not that candidates who get the most money win, but that winning candidates get the most money.

So long as politicians need millions to win a seat in Congress and nearly a billion to contest the White House, they will sanctify the methods needed to raise such sums.

In a political contest, the use of some [money] is both right, and indispensable.

Money is the mother's milk of politics

Money has always been in politics. And I'm not sure you'd want money to be completely out of politics.

Whenever the media asked me how much I have received in campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, my unapologetic answer was, 'Not enough.'

Even Democrats were donating to me.

Unless public officials are wealthy and fund their own campaigns, the only place they can turn to is lobbyists and institutions like labor unions and corporations.

Asking politicians to give up a source of money is like asking Dracula to forsake blood.

There is a reason why these people [from Wall Street] are putting huge amounts of money into our political system. And in my view, it is undermining American democracy and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors and not the working families of this country.

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.

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.

Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it. New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it's also our economic center. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy.

I don't care if the Koch brothers or Soros spend their money to promote one candidate or another. I care about members of Congress spending 30%-70% of their time raising money from .05% of us. Change the way we fund elections and you change the corruption.

Politics is a damn expensive business. I had one hell of a time trying to raise money as a candidate. I had to put a second mortgage on our house to get that campaign started, and I ended up spending over $300,000 to get elected. I believe that public financing of federal election campaigns is the only thing that will insure good candidates and save the two-party system. It is the most degrading thing in the world to go out with your hat in your hand and beg for money, but that's what you have to do if you haven't got your own resources.

Barack Obama's large contributor was Goldman Sachs - same thing on the Republican side. If you go to both their conventions, you see the same lobbyists paying off both sides so they win either way.

In fact, corporate and union moneys go overwhelmingly to incumbents, so limiting that money, as Congress did in the campaign finance law, may be the single most self-denying thing that Congress has ever done.