Skip to content

Barney Frank Quotes

1940–2026 United States

Barnett "Barney" Frank (March 31, 1940 – May 19, 2026) was an American politician who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013.

United States
Agnostics

Random Barney Frank quote

11 quotes

The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.

Moderate Republicans are reverse Houdinis. They tie themselves up in knots and then tell you they can't do anything because they're tied up in knots.

I’m surprised to find absence of explicit anti-Semitism this time. Was a page missing?

The issue is not that morals be applied to public policy, it's that conservatives bring public policy to spheres of our lives where it should not enter.

I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

The opposite of pragmatism is not idealism. It’s wishful thinking.

If... we were to cut military spending by 25 percent from its projected levels, we would still be immeasurably stronger than any combination of nations with whom we might be engaged.

… [they] believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth…

In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.

These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.

In the debate between those who believe in essentially unregulated markets and others who hold that reasonable regulation diminishes market excesses without inhibiting their basic function, the subprime situation unfortunately provides ammunition for the latter view.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Barney Frank (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.