lobbying QUOTES

1 " Da. This is going very well already." Thomas barked out a laugh. " There are seven of us against the Red King and his thirteen most powerful nobles, and it's going well?" Mouse sneezed." Eight," Thomas corrected himself. He rolled his eyes and said, " And the psycho death faerie makes it nine." " It is like movie," Sanya said, nodding. " Dibs on Legolas." " Are you kidding?" Thomas said. " I'm obviously Legolas. You're . . ." He squinted thoughtfully at Sanya and then at Martin. " Well. He's Boromir and you're clearly Aragorn." " Martin is so dour, he is more like Gimli." Sanya pointed at Susan. " Her sword is much more like Aragorn's." " Aragorn wishes he looked that good," countered Thomas." What about Karrin?" Sanya asked." What--for Gimli?" Thomas mused. " She is fairly--" " Finish that sentence, Raith, and we throw down," said Murphy in a calm, level voice." Tough," Thomas said, his expression aggrieved. " I was going to say 'tough.' " As the discussion went on--with Molly's sponsorship, Mouse was lobbying to claim Gimli on the basis of being the shortest, the stoutest, and the hairiest--" Sanya," I said. " Who did I get cast as?" " Sam," Sanya said.I blinked at him. " Not . . . Oh, for crying out loud, it was perfectly obvious who I should have been." Sanya shrugged. " It was no contest. They gave Gandalf to your godmother. You got Sam. "

2 " Ah, adventure! Ah, romance! Ah, courtly graces and the noble gestures! Don't you wish you knew people like that? Don't you wish we could still walk around in cloaks and boots and breeches, with leather doublets and flowing white dueling shirts and swords strapped around our waists? Of course, if we did, given the way things are today, there'd be people out there lobbying for sword control, and we'd need a National Sword Association and bumper stickers that would read " Swords don't kill people, knights kill people," and there would be a five-day waiting period and background check before you could buy a rapier. We'd have drive-by lungings and people would be afraid of children carrying broadswords to school. " Milady" would be regard as a sexist term and feminists would go absolutely berserk if any woman called a man " Milord." Ralph Nader would probably get quarter horses banned because they are too small and unsafe in a collision and someone would figure out a way to put seat belts and air bags on our saddles. That's why people join the SCA and read fantasy novels, because the real world sucks. "

3 " As long as government has the power to regulate business, business will control government by funding the candidate that legislates in their favor. A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government! The only sure way to prevent the rich from buying unfair government influence is to stop allowing government to use physical force against peaceful people. Whenever government is allowed to favor one group over another, the rich will always win, since they can " buy" more favors, overtly or covertly, than the poor. "

4 " Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. "

― George Carlin

5 " Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can’t major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic. There’s plenty more to learn: we know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition. It won’t be easy, but it’s not obviously impossible: exactly the kind of field that could yield secrets. "

― Peter Thiel

6 " A civilian-based diplomacy supports noncommercial, nonprofit, and publicly-subsidized media to counteract the corporate-controlled, for-profit, private media that dominate political discourse; and works to place media control, ownership, and lobbying at the center of public policy debate. "

― Nancy Snow , Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World

7 " Fashion and public relations share a charter to turn life to their own advantage, to make malleable and commercially useful the naked human perception. Both interests consider life too small, dull, and colorless to get itself sufficiently noticed without the lobbying efforts of professionals. "

― Kennedy Fraser

8 " Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario. "

― Seth Godin , Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?)

9 " I'm a lobbyist and had a career lobbying. The guy who gets elected or the lady who gets elected president of the United States will immediately be lobbying. They would be advocating to the Congress, they'll be lobbying our allies and our adversaries overseas. They'll be asking the business community and labor unions. "

10 " The important thing to remember with the Internet is that there are large companies that have an interest in controlling how information flows in it. They're very effective at lobbying Congress, and that pattern has locked down other communication media in the past. And it will happen again unless we do something about it. "

11 " Family law is institutionally anti-male. I've been lobbying MPs, and I'm not going to give up campaigning for equality until I get equality. "

12 " As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change. "

13 " Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen. "

14 " Every single dollar spent lobbying a legislator on behalf of oil and gas is a toxic dollar that undermines public health and safety laws that protect Americans. That's contamination of the political system. "