Quotes By William Weld

I think government has a major role to play in helping us with the pursuit of happiness.

If we have major geographic areas within our continent that have a tremendous lack of economic opportunity, we found that that is going to produce instability _ economic, political and social.

There are several such issues where I have departed radically from the Republican orthodoxy.

The courts are truly the least dangerous of the three branches of our government.

Government has a role as well in what is referred to as redistributive justice.

My slogan when I ran was that there is no such thing as government money, there is only taxpayer's money, and that cut pretty deep.

We absolutely have to restrain concentrations of wealth in industry from spoiling the situation for everybody.

Government can contribute to a shared sense of purpose on the part of the citizenry; that's its highest and best application.

Opposing the free flow of goods or people is a bad idea.

I suggest to you that increasing the size of America's economic pie - which can be achieved only if everybody has a seat at the table - is the most important challenge facing our country today.

I have come to realize that Jesse Helms stands for everything in politics that is anathema to me.

Much is forgiven anyone who relieves the desperate boredom of the working press.

I don't understand the Democrats' approach to Social Security in this country, and I'm not alone.

One of the functions of government is to act as a safeguard not just of property but of our liberties.

I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum.

The system that had grown up in most states is that wealthy districts with an affluent population can afford to spend a lot more on their public school systems than the poorer districts.

I extend that to the abortion issue, I extend that to the so-called gay rights issue, I think this is a freedom principle and consistent with the analysis in the economic area as well.

Liberals often don't see the problems, and conservatives don't see the promise, of government.

Do we believe that there is equal economic opportunity out there in the real world, right now, for each and every one of these groups? If we believed in the tooth fairy, if we believed in the Easter Bunny, we might well believe that.

In the nineteenth century, slavery was the greatest wrong, and government never stood so tall as when it was redressing that wrong.

It's healthy for government to be a kind of moral catalyst, using the bully pulpit of high office.

So government acts as a safeguard of our property.

Before my tenure, people didn't seem to think that citizens had a right to limit the size of their government.

It's not good for government to tell people that the world owes them a living and that things are free.

The unemployment rate is still twice as high for blacks as for whites.

We need a complete ban on soft money, which is sort of an enveloping problem, and a ceiling on the amount of money that can be spent on a given race.

I think transportation and corrections are not the first two areas that I would go looking for massive change.

Micro managing anything is not a great role for government.

Government is never so noble as when it is addressing wrongs.

Natural resources are so vast that no single individual or business is going to protect them; they don't have an incentive to.