Public Infrastructure Quotes

Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine.

To be sure, the United States has profound problems, not least our faltering educational and physical infrastructure.

I think most people would like that: probably comes in about ninety percent. They see their public works crumbling, services inadequate, they have libraries and schools and bridges and highways that have not been repaired.

People need to see where their dollars are going and what infrastructure is being built.

Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You're already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren't.

Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better.

As far as I'm concerned, the people who aren't paying taxes don't get to run around claiming that they built everything, that the built the roads and that they built the bridges and so forth.

Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history.

Establishment at public expense of rural depots for the most improved agricultural machinery, to be lent out to the agricultural population at a rent covering cost and management alone.

I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.

What I think people should realize is that programs like Social Security, programs like Medicare, programs like the Veterans Administration, programs like your local park and your local library - those are, if you like, socialist programs; they're run by [and] for the public, not to make money. I think in many ways we should expand that concept so that the American people can enjoy the same benefits that people all over the world are currently enjoying.

Let's start and build a House that works for the people, because this is the people's House.

The Public provides freedom...Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there. Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory.

Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.

Architecture is the work of nations

I want to stop directing so many of resources to the military budget and focus them here at home. I believe government should invest in public infrastructure.

We actually know that our crumbling pipelines, roads, and bridges are ticking time bombs. That is why President Obama and Congressional Democrats have pushed to fund jobs that repair our roads, runways, and railways - we can't have first rate American communities with third-world American infrastructure.

Whatever your race, colour or creed in London, you still want your children to get on the housing ladder. You still want spaces in hospitals or GP surgeries, you want school places and you want space on the trains in the mornings.

Millennium Trails will be very tangible gifts to the future. We will walk on them and hike on them and bike on them. They will be accessible to people of all ages and abilities. But in a very important way they represent more than the tangible effect of the trail. They represent a commitment and an investment in what kind of country we want in the next century.

When the government says we're going to build something on behalf of the community, we do it.

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed

It is difficult even now for the President to avoid giving his approbation to any law appropriating money for a road or canal.

The northern and western companies of inland lock navigation, having, agreeably to law, produced authentic accounts of their expenditures, I have given the necessary certificate to entitle them to receive from the Treasury the sum of ten thousand pounds, as a free gift on the part of this State towards the prosecution of those interesting objects. Although the care of improving and opening these navigations be committed to private companies, they will require, and no doubt from time to time receive, from the Legislature, every fostering aid and patronage commensurate to the great public advantages which must result from the improvement of the means of intercourse

The wall is going to to take a while. Obviously [Donald Trump] is going to build it.It's a campaign promise; he's not going to break a campaign promise.