Town Meetings Quotes

This day I learned that the caucus club meets at certain times in the garret of Tom Dawes, the adjutant of the Boston regiment.... There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one end of the room to another. There they drink flip, I suppose, and there they choose a moderator who puts questions to the vote regularly; and selectmen, assessors, collectors, firewards, and representatives are regularly chosen before they are chosen in the town [of Boston].

To secure a full effect to your object, it will be necessary that you should meet and consult together for the common good in your towns and counties. It is in dark and trying times that this constitutional privilege.

We are intent on building a movement. The next step is grassroots town meetings. We must keep alive the dialogue around the covenants.

Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach.

Town meetings are not bean bag. I've had hundreds of them, and sometimes folks get upset. And that's part of America, part of our process.

Increased town size hurts real democracy in two ways. First… it dramatically reduces the percentage of citizens who attend town meetings. Second, town size increases the number of citizens who attend, which dramatically reduces the percentage of these attendees who participate.”

I'd make - before I'd elect somebody - I'd make him do town meetings and face the people and then I would insist that the person not run on a platform of no compromising. The meaningful thing that the leaders could do would be to be dedicated to a discussion across the isle, to vote their consciences and not to follow the strict party line. I think that would lead to sensible decisions.

At town meetings, you can see the shy folks, the ones who have trouble sounding off in public, leaning against the back wall or bending over their knitting. On talk radio, those people are invisible, but they're there. It's a mistake to think that the blowhards who call in speak for the nation.

In our town meetings, and in our school district meetings, wealthy and substantial men oppose the grant of $15 to a school library, and of $30 for both library and apparatus; while at West Point they spend $50 in a single lesson at target firing, and the government keeps a hundred horses, and grooms and blacksmiths to take care of them, as an indispensable part of the apparatus of the academy. The pupils of our Normal schools, who are preparing to become teachers, must maintain themselves; the cadets at the academy receive $28 a month, during their entire term, as a compensation for being educated at the public expense.

The consequences of these institutions (The towns or districts, the congregations, the schools,and the militia.) have been, that the inhabitants, having acquired from their infancy the habit of discussing, of deliberating, and of judging of public affairs, it was in these assemblies of towns or districts that the sentiments of the people were formed in the first place, and their resolutions were taken from the beginning to the end of the disputes and the war with Great Britain.

What I would ask the leaders to do is to better understand the American people. I would insist that the leaders have town meetings and meet the people and listen to them and find out what is on their minds.