Jim McDermott famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I'm old enough to remember John Kennedy sending a few advisers into Vietnam. I'm very worried we'll get in and we'll get mired down in something we don't have any idea what to do [with].
-- Jim McDermott

#Military #Ideas #Iraq
I'm not giving the president a blank check, period.
-- Jim McDermott

#Giving #President #Checks
I have stood on the front lines of the health care system as a doctor, patient and concerned parent. Those experiences have served as my guideposts throughout the struggle to reform America's health care system. And it's those same experiences that tell me that fear and election hysteria should not overshadow the reality of reform.
-- Jim McDermott

#Struggle #Reality #Hysteria
There's nothing wrong with the free-enterprise system. But it has to have some compassion.
-- Jim McDermott

#Compassion #Enterprise
You can make people do anything if they're afraid.
-- Jim McDermott

#Fear #People
But beyond the hysteria of phantom death panels, where is the abomination? Show me the provisions that will hurt consumers, because if you think a $110 billion a year tax break for working-class Americans to buy private health insurance is a government takeover, I welcome the debate.
-- Jim McDermott

#Hurt #Thinking #Government
I think it's a trial balloon to see what happens, and I'm not impressed with it.
-- Jim McDermott

#Thinking #Trials #Balloons

When there's a status quo, usually what shakes everybody up is some sort of military confrontation, at which point we all come running and screaming to pick up the pieces.
If there is no military need for the building, leave it alone, neither putting anyone in or out of it, except on finding some one preaching or practicing treason, in which case lay hands on him, just as if he were doing the same thing in any other building.
Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.
Piglet was so excited at the idea of being Useful that he forgot to be frightened any more, and when Rabbit went on to say that Kangas were only Fierce during the winter months, being at other times of an Affectionate Disposition, he could hardly sit still, he was so eager to begin being useful at once.
Once I went to bed in Orlando and I woke up in Atlanta. I have no idea how that happened.
I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.
I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11.
Whether we kept a certain number of troops there or pulled out completely, if we can't get the Maliki government to include a large segment of its population in its security forces and protection, then the small amount of forces that we would have left there might have slowed this day, but they wouldn't have prevented it altogether.
The Americans stabbed in the back the forces that worked to bring about the collapse of Saddam's regime and wanted to keep Iraq a sovereign country.
I strongly believe that a federal structure based on administrative and geographic lines with strong powers for the federated states will be the best solution for Iraq.

Jim McDermott famous quotes

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