Famous Quotes

Quotes by John Sununu

• Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment? Blame Wall Street.
• Defining marriage is a power that should be left to the states. Moreover, no state should be forced to recognize a marriage that is not within its own laws, Constitution, and legal precedents.
• Don't let that weapon technology proliferate. Don't let Saddam Hussein get capability for nuclear or chemical weapons, because he's already shown a willingness to use any weapon at his disposal.
• Energy and environmental regulation, transportation, and broadband policy all benefit when legislators have a basic grounding in the technical concepts behind business models, products, and innovation.
• For most Americans, Friday afternoons are filled with positive anticipation of the weekend. In Washington, it's where government officials dump stories they want to bury. Good news gets dropped on Monday so bureaucrats can talk about it all week.
• Growing up, I was encouraged to get a good education, get a real job doing something I enjoyed, and, should the opportunity present itself, consider public service as just that: a chance to serve, not an end in itself.
• I understand the process of politics and the game of television.
• It worries me about our unwillingness to really address reforms and modernization in Medicare. This thing was designed 37 years ago. It has not evolved to keep pace with current medical technology.
• It's counterintuitive, but the most divisive arrangement is when the same party controls both Congress and the presidency, a situation encountered in eight of the past 10 years. With government unified under a single party, the minority has the least possible incentive to cooperate with the majority.
• Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution, yellow-pages directories, landline telephones, and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution.
• Politicians also have a love affair with the 'small business exemption.' Too much paperwork? Too heavy a burden? Not enough time? Just exempt small businesses from the rule. It sounds so pro-growth. Instead it's an admission that the costs of a regulation just can't be justified.
• Politicians are usually the first to forget that if you assume someone else is acting in bad faith, they will do the same to you. Questioning motives poisons the well.
• Politics thrives on simple, clean messages, something that played to Obama's advantage in 2008. Stagnant unemployment and the loss of America's AAA rating are as simple and tough as they come. This is the economy on Obama's watch, and there's no one left to blame.
• President Obama has outsourced a major portion of the U.S. space program to the Russians. That's national policy. Taxpayer money. So let's stop playing games with this outsourcing distortion and talk about the fact that when we need is a president that knows how to manage big enterprise and create jobs.
• The American formula for creating business is not to have the government create business.
• The debt-ceiling vote isn't about what will be done in the future it is about the integrity of America's commitment to support the bonds we issue. Elected officials have an obligation to maintain that integrity, regardless of whether they voted for the programs that required the borrowing in the first place.
• The Internet creates as well as destroys. Social networks, search advertising, and cloud computing are multibillion dollar industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. They are products of the same force that has rendered the Postal Service's core business obsolete.
• The Internet will win because it is relentless. Like a cannibal, it even turns on it own. Though early portals like Prodigy and AOL once benefited from their first-mover status, competitors surpassed them as technology and consumer preferences changed.
• The precise point at which a tax deduction becomes a 'loophole' or a tax incentive becomes a 'subsidy for special interests' is one of the great mysteries of politics.
• The voters are going to decide in November who is going to fix their personal family dismay over not having jobs in America. They are going to pick Mitt Romney.
• This is technology that will not go away. And to risk it moving into the hands of a terrorist group like al Qaeda or to other focused enemies of the United States, would have tragic consequences.
• We will have to continue to improve our human intelligence system-something that was, unfortunately, lacking in the years which led up to September 11. This is going to be a continuing process of change.
• When we're talking about technology that involves weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, there has to be an element of preemption.