Linda Chavez Quotes

And I have a plan to do even better, to end welfare as we know it

Speaker Newt Gingrich says that what is wrong with the present system is not that people abuse welfare but that welfare abuses people.

The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people's pockets but to put more responsibility in people's pockets.

The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.

The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…they don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

In the past, the public assistance programs have been too much concerned with the mere dispatching of monthly checks. … it is high time that some concerted effort be made to get people off the rolls who can sustain themselves.

I am deeply convinced that any permanent, regular administrative system whose aim is to provide for the needs of the poor will breed more miseries than it can cure, will deprave the population that it wants to help and comfort, will dry up the sources of savings, will stop the accumulation of capital, will retard the development of trade, and will benumb human industry.

We shouldn't turn the safety net into a hammock. It should actually be a safety net.

We passed welfare reform. All of you know I believe we were right to do it.

The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on AFDC, will now grow to a clear majority of the U.S. population.

The matter of social security and these grants is to help to address the levels of poverty in the country.

Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems.

What...can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.

I don't believe in welfare.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion about the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

Poverty-fighting programs are not handouts - they are investments.

While the rest of the country is still talking about welfare reform, Texas is implementing it.

The difficulty is, Pell Grants are an attempt to do the right thing, and that is to give the low-income student an opportunity to access higher education, and that's a good thing. And welfare was an attempt to help those most in need. The difficulty is, often times a program is so successful that it grows and grows and grows and grows.

When they seek to cut programs that help families living in poverty, I will fight them every step of the way.

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

Reduction of dependency is the greatest unmet need in social policy today.

Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizenship. If private cooperative endeavor fails to provide work for willing hands and relief for the unfortunate, those suffering hardship from no fault of their own have a right to call upon the Government for aid; and a government worthy of its name must make fitting response.

What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. In so far as they fail, they receive the money; in so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.

Even in the United States, 'you have a sort of welfare state, even if you don't want to admit it -- you don't allow people to die on the street.