Jack Abramoff Quotes

You can't beat somebody with nobody.

I'm a hypercompetitive individual.

Lobbying is not a bad thing. I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't have lobbyists or we shouldn't have lobbying to petition our government. It's in the Constitution, and it's something that should be honorable and good.

A senator will come off Capitol Hill and they'll be barred from two years from lobbying in the Senate. So they'll pick the phone up and they'll call their buddy, the senator, their old buddies, and they'll say, 'Listen, I'm here at this law firm now. I can't lobby you, but my new partner, Jack, can lobby you.'

Human beings are weak.

As a lobbyist, I was completely against term limits, and I know a lot of people are against term limits, and I was one of the leaders, because why? As a lobbyist, once you buy a congressional office, you don't have to re-buy that office in six years, right?

I'm not trying to become popular.

In Hollywood, they put the knife in your front; in D.C., they put it in your back. I found far fewer duplicitous people in Hollywood.

If you chose to serve in Congress or on a congressional staff, you should be barred for life from working for any company, organization, or association which lobbies the federal government.

I know I'm intellectually capable of finding a series of things and making hundreds of millions. I have to get there and do it. Carefully. Legally.

Words will not be able to ever express how sorry I am for this, and I have profound regret and sorrow for the multitude of mistakes and harm I have caused.

I support myself by public speaking and trying to work on as many appropriate and legitimate ventures as I can.

All I want is for people not to see me as this cartoon monster.

They realize that spending millions to save billions is just good business.

Having gone through what I went through, watching my family be torn to shreds and my children suffer immensely, I can't be the agent of doing that to someone else. I can't be the agent of causing someone to go to prison.

I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.

Well, I think the great tragedy in American politics is what is legal, not what is illegal.

No one wants a domain with their name on it owned by somebody else.

I'm not a complete libertarian. There is a proper role in some areas of the government to have rules and regulations - I'm not an anarchist.

Some issues lend themselves to grassroots campaigns - homeschooling works well - but others require contrivance and connivance to whip up support. Often, lobbyists will hire vendors to dispatch blast emails and robocalls in the hopes of bombarding Congressional offices with citizen fury.

It's very difficult for felons to live in society.

I got into lobbying kind of against my will at first. I frankly didn't want to be a lobbyist, but I realized that in lobbying I could do things politically that were interesting to me and do some what I thought would be good. I'm not sure it all turned out like that, but at least that was some of the initial thinking.

In the past few years I have begun the process of becoming a new man.

Congress doesn't hate Congress.

I don't pay much attention to sports.

Prisoners do different things. Some write, some read. Some engage in athletic events and working out and some do all of that. Some get involved in the religious groups that they're part of. Some get involved in hobbies that are permitted in prison. There are plenty of ways to stay busy. You're never going to survive in prison unless you start getting busy.

In my religion it's actually better to know you're doing wrong and try to improve that wrong than to think philosophically that what you're doing is right and in fact it is wrong.

I might dream, but I am no dreamer.

I can't vote again ever, so political party is not a relevant thing for me.

In the past two years, I've started the process of becoming a new man. I am much chastened and profoundly remorseful over the reckless and hurtful things I have done in my life, especially those which have brought me before you today.

All I have, really, is my creativity.

As a result, I've been portrayed as a cynical barbarian preying on the very clients I was charged to defend.