Marc Reisner Quotes

We all have to pay when powerful members of Congress work to bring home the bacon.

The President is going around the country handing out so much pork that the Agriculture Department is going to have to station a meat inspector on board Air Force One.

George W. Bush is a big spender…. When Congress sends up a bill with big. fat, crackling pork, he says, “Where’s the barbecue sauce?”

Congressmen have their noses right in the trough and they're slurping it up for their districts at the expense of all the taxpayers.

Our nation was founded on the pork barrel, and it has become great by political log-rolling.

Pork is the most visible malady of Congress from the public point of view.

The Pig Book

Homeland Security money ought not to be allocated on a pork barrel basis.

Those members of Congress who want to bring back pork to their districts should stand up proudly and be counted.

I view roads as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State

Where the public money runs deepest the hogs fight each other to get their snouts in the trough, and the big trough nowadays runs through the Pentagon.

The host of contractors, speculators, stockjobbers, and lobby members which haunt the halls of Congress, all desirous ... to get their arm into the public treasury, are sufficient to alarm every friend of this country. Their progress must be arrested.

The ideal weapons system is built in 435 congressional districts, and it doesn't matter whether it works or not.

The root of most all problems we have today is the uncontrollable appetite of politicians in Washington to dish it out.

A lot of times, politicians will go to where their strongest force is and do things for them, and that's the type of thing they do that I find offensive.

I am guilty of asking the Senate for pork and proud of the Senate for giving it to me.

In Congress, it's all pork, all the time.

Anytime a large, emergency spending bill makes its way through Congress, the potential for mischief is great.

We see people voting for bills that their ideals and principles are opposed to, but because their little funding project is in there, they're voting for it. We might say it's one percent of all spending but the impact of that spending is far greater.

There's no doubt about it, earmarks are not very popular. There are good earmarks and bad earmarks. The good earmarks are the ones I get for my district.

The earmark favor factory needs to be boarded up and demolished, not turned over to new management that may or may not have a better eye for earmarks with 'merit.'

I will devote none of my time to developing laws to increase my own patronage and multiply canvassers [electors] in my favor.

Sooner or later you have to reach down into that old pork barrel.

I am not in Washington as a statesman. I am there as a very well paid messenger boy doing your errands. My chief occupation is going around with a forked stick picking up little fragments of patronage for my constituents.

There's more pork barrel than strategic need to the Galaxy.