Lamar Alexander Quotes

I think there's plenty of evidence that we need to stop spewing so much carbon into the air, that we're contributing to climate change and that we ought to look for alternatives.

The job of mayor and Governor is becoming more and more like the job of university president, which I used to be; it looks like you are in charge, but you are not.

It is ironic that Mr. Berger learned of this espionage in exactly the same month that Mr. Gore was attending his now famous fund-raiser with Buddhist nuns in Southern California.

Americans wouldn't do that [cashing out the same day]. Then they would be in the great old thing we used to call the marketplace. You know, we have hundreds of millions of stock shares floating every day. People buy them and sell them and trade them.

There are a growing number of conservatives and Republicans who, while they support the president and support the war in Iraq, wonder how many of these nation-building wars we're going to engage in and what the parameters of that are.

I've got a new rule. It'll be rule No. 312. If it's three days before a campaign, don't believe anything new you hear about anybody.

We hear a lot about rebuilding Detroit, and we just spent $70 billion to bail out the auto industry - well, they need to be cost competitive, too. If they have high-cost energy, those suppliers are going to move to Japan or Mexico instead of Michigan and Tennessee.

In the Senate, where 60 votes are required to do anything important, you have to work with your colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

The goal with a big piece of social legislation is to have a bipartisan result, so the country will accept it.

I think there are too many bosses in Washington telling Nashville Diesel College and Harvard University how to run - how to run their campuses, and I'd like to reduce the number of Washington regulations on higher education and keep this marketplace of wonderful institutions among which students can choose; that's oriented toward job growth.

I think, I think we need a Republican president from the real world to remind ourselves sometimes of what we need to do.

Primarily, we need to change 100 years of thinking, where we try to extend the promise of American life by moving things to Washington, and let's move it the other way: less of Washington, more from ourselves.

I love Washington, D.C.; I love this country, but I think over the last hundred years we've built up would I call an arrogant empire: people who think the rest of us are too stupid to make our own decisions.

If the administration asks for $5 and Congress appropriates $4, that's what they get. If the government creates a subterfuge by going outside the government to raise money through a private entity, that's a violation of the law.

To power the country by building 186,000 fifty-story wind turbines - and running 19,000 miles of new transmission lines - just seems impractical and preposterous compared to the idea of building a hundred new nuclear facilities primarily on the sites we already have.

The main interest of most members of the Christian Coalition is the breakdown of the family. I think that's our biggest problem, and if the whole country was as concerned and active in issues of the family as members of the Christian Coalition are, we'd probably be better off as a country.

The idea of windmills conjures up pleasant images - of Holland and tulips, of rural America with windmill blades slowly turning, pumping water at the farm well ... But the windmills we are talking about today are not your grandmother's windmills. Each one is typically 100 yards tall, two stories taller than the Stature of Liberty, taller than a football field is long.

Americans are sick of the idea of the government taking over everything and trying to run it. We don't know how to run a bank, a car company.

I need to know the price of a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I need to know right now.

Well, here's what I think. I mean, the people are saying, 'We don't want it,' and the Democrats are saying, 'We don't care. We're going to pass it anyway.' And so for the next three months, Washington will be consumed with the Democrats trying to jam this through in a very messy procedure an unpopular health care bill.

As Governor, I could think of only one way to unify our State that was made up of so many different climates, political beliefs and people, and that was our music.

President Bush and I had asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to school vouchers. We didn't get it, and we were disappointed. But we did not go out and form a corporation to pay for it. That would have been a problem.

We do all the appropriating. They do not do any of it down at the White House. They send a budget up here, and we don't have to pay any attention it to at all. We do what we want to do.