John Dingell Quotes

The harsh fact of the matter is when you're passing legislation that will cover 300 million American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

If were going to change the laws, lets change them in ways which makes it easier to catch criminals, and yet at the same time protect the Second Amendment rights of our law-abiding citizens.

War is failure of diplomacy.

If I were to select a jack-booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms].

Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.

I'm Polish, I carry no grudges.

If we're going to spend a lot of money to deal with the problem of 200 million guns in the country owned by 65 million gun owners, we ought to have a system which will work and catch criminals.

I have enormous respect for Tom Daschle. The NRA has not yet taken a formal position on which I'm aware of on this matter, and I think Tom may be just getting a little ahead of things.

The Congress has now become a fairly evenly divided entity.

Mr. Dingell is just plain Mr. Dingell. And when he gets to be chairman of the Commerce Committee, he doesn't let it go to his head. However, he thinks he would be a very, very good chairman.

I can support going in after Saddam Hussein, but I want to make sure I don't go alone.

If you talk to any of my Democratic colleagues who lost that year, they would tell that gun control was one of the major contributory factors in the loss of their seats.

Everything in our foreign and domestic policy is a question of issue for the American people to vote on.

I still think it would be a great mistake to go into a war without support of our friends and allies.

Nobody in this country realizes that cap and trade is a tax, and it's a great big one.

The mistake that was made was, of course, leaving Saddam Hussein in charge of affairs.

The Democratic Party needs to look carefully at moving towards the middle, where the American people are.

If the president is failing to disclose material facts with regard to legislation being presented to the Congress on a question as important as war and peace, I think it does impair the level of trust that the House and the Senate have for this administration.

Compromise is an honorable word.

My old daddy used to say "kill the closest snake first".

There is a tendency of the American people to give those who are elected an opportunity to carry out their policies and programs.

The Democratic Party is a house of many mansions. It is a body which is extremely important in representing all kinds of people in all parts of the country who have very broad and very different views.

I have worked with Presidents since Eisenhower. We serve together.

I think we will begin to see some real efforts made to do things like protecting Social Security and Medicare.

The DOE and DOD are among the most notorious offenders of our hazardous waste laws.

I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah or for or against Israel.

To go to war, you must always think of, can you win?