Barney Frank

“For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.”

“I have done a lot of work for affordable housing, rental housing. I understand the rap on me and other liberals is, oh, we push poor people into homeownership. And it's exactly the opposite of the case. We were trying to prevent those kinds of bad loans.”

“The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.”

“I'm antisocial - there's no question about it.”

“Martin Luther King said, and it is sadly still true, that one of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship.”

“Well, I don't give it out very often, but I reject the notion that you have to be a practitioner to give good advice.”

“When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.”

“But on those occasions when I do strongly disagree with the Democrats and I don't say anything, I think I forfeit my right to have people pay attention to me when I say the things that I don't like about what Republicans are saying.”

“Capitalism works better from every perspective when the economic decision makers are forced to share power with those who will be affected by those decisions.”

“But it is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency.”

“And I think there is too much bloviating around from politicians.”

“I had always been interested in politics. I had assumed, for a variety of - well, for two reasons, being Jewish and being gay back in the late '50s, early '60s - that I would never be elected or anything, but I would participate as an activist.”

“In this view, the role of the great majority of Americans is simply to buy the products produced, work happily for their wages, and leave all of the significant economic decisions to the capitalists.”

“Pat Moynihan could write books with one hand and legislate with the other. I can't; I have a short attention span. The slightest distraction would take me away from writing.”

“I filed the first gay rights bill in Massachusetts history in 1972 in the legislature, one of the first in the country.”

“It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.”

“People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.”