Public Aid Quotes

We have responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

Could we do without the social safety net, without Social Security, without Medicare, without farm subsidies, without unemployment compensation, without school lunch programs, without housing assistance? Of course we could. But we would not be a civilized society and we would not be an American nation any of us would be proud of.

There was an old Woman who lived in a shoe She had so many children Her government subsidy check came to $4,892.

A safety net for the poor indeed requires some level of income redistribution.

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.

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

Ronald Reagan came from show business. His idea of how the government should help the homeless was like your agent. "We'll try to get you work. But don't bug us about it."

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.

I don't think you expand entitlements when so many people are dependent on government and when the money the federal government is offering is going to be taken away from you after just a couple of years.

So you can go to college on Pell Grants - maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it's turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century.

At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.

The First Amendment’s purpose was to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority by comprehensively forbidding every form of public aid or support for religion.

I'm not living off of any taxpayer money. If I am - if it's food stamps, it's a temporary resource.

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

Liberals measure compassion by counting the number of people receiving government help.

The northern and western companies of inland lock navigation, having, agreeably to law, produced authentic accounts of their expenditures, I have given the necessary certificate to entitle them to receive from the Treasury the sum of ten thousand pounds, as a free gift on the part of this State towards the prosecution of those interesting objects. Although the care of improving and opening these navigations be committed to private companies, they will require, and no doubt from time to time receive, from the Legislature, every fostering aid and patronage commensurate to the great public advantages which must result from the improvement of the means of intercourse

We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.

Few nations do more than the United States to assist their least fortunate citizens-to make certain that no child, no elderly or handicapped citizen, no family in any circumstances in any State, is left without the essential needs for a decent and healthy existence. In too few nations, I might add, are the people aware of the progressive strides this country has taken in demonstrating the humanitarian side of freedom. Our record is a proud one-and it sharply refutes those who accuse us of thinking only in the materialistic terms of cash registers and calculating machines.

You're not supposed to be admitted to America if you're likely to be a charge on the public - if you're going to need government aid to take care of yourself ... It [2006 immigration bill] failed because it did not do what it said it would do... End the illegality first. Then we can wrestle with how to treat compassionately people who have been in America for a long time.

What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance.

The government should cultivate the view also among the propertyless classes of the population, those who are the most numerous and the least educated, that the state is not only an institution of necessity but also of welfare. By recognizable and direct advantages they must be led to look upon the state not as an agency devised solely for the protection of the better-situated classes of society but also as one serving their needs and interests.

You measure a government by how few people need help.

We shouldn't have to give up all our rights, just because we are receiving a Government benefit.

In some instances even certain social services that normally were supplied, or pre-empted by the state. Take the United States, the [Ronald] Reagan administration is withdrawing assistance, all kinds of welfare programs, and if people don't improvise their own resources to cope with problems of the ageing, problems of the sick, problems of the young, problems of the poor, problems of tenant rights, who will?