Think-tanks Quotes

Once again the mastermind was Lionel Curtis, and the earlier Round Table Groups and Institutes of International Affairs were used as nuclei for the new network.

When the President starts lying he begins to need evidence to back up his lies because in this democracy he is questioned on his statements. It then percolates down through the bureaucracy that you are helping the Boss if you come up with evidence that is supportive of our public position and you are distinctly unhelpful if you commit to paper statements that might leak to the wrong people. The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting....

I can't throw a nickel from the Capitol without hitting a think tank that's been financed by one of the Gulf States.

If the big banks expect to buy influence when they give money to favored think tanks, then the public has a right to know. If the big banks don't expect to buy influence and are merely making charitable contributions, then their shareholders have a right to know. Either way, there's no excuse for keeping these payments secret.

Each one of our ideas should benefit the people with less power than us.

Think tanks are chiefly supposed to provide independent expertise to policymakers. But they also seek to be politically relevant.

I think the scary thing is that there is in place already a sprawling infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, academics and candidates and politicians funded by the Kochs and other deep-pocketed groups on the far right ready to attack Hillary Clinton.

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

There is no right to work in a think tank, and these are very privileged positions.

There's been a 40-year effort on the far right to build up think tanks, academic programs, advocacy groups, to push a particular ideology. That's really where the impact is that people don't see.

I think when you have so many people working for American-based think tanks and American-based defense companies, there is always going to be a bent towards proposing American-led solutions for foreign problems. People get paid big money in Washington to come up with ways that America can fix problems overseas, and they are not always right.

Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.

… schools of liberty …. warehouses of disinterested patriotism

Because policymakers often rely on think tanks' research when crafting laws and regulations, it's critical to know whether these organizations are truly independent.

I so often doubt how much people on television believe what they're saying. They're playing roles for think tanks or political parties or shills of whatever stripe.

If you don’t find out who’s paying for these groups then you don’t know what they’re up to.

Think tanks do have points of view, and they are absolutely entitled to defend them.

You shouldn't have to be a chair at a think tank to speak your mind.

My understanding is that Exxon, in particular, did fund a variety of small think tanks to generate what amounts to propaganda against understanding of what climate change was doing, the human role in causing it.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

I think that there's been an unfortunate tendency for right wing think tanks to dominate these discussions. They often produce very shoddy studies and policy recommendations, which are nevertheless taken very seriously.

When the so-called think tanks began to replace the thought processes of human beings, I called them the aseptic tanks.

You have think tanks like the widely respected Atlantic Council that have published reports in the past year that have called Afghanistan a failing state.

No particular prior experience—not business or academia, or think tanks, or law—suggests that an individual will master the bureaucratic politics of Washington DC.

President Trump watches a lot of television. I mean, really a lot. His favourite channel is Fox. Now just imagine somebody wants put a message in front of the president. You can hire a lobbyist or you can buy a minute on Fox or you can even pay somebody at a think tank to articulate your message and then pay a booker at that think tank to get that person on Fox and put the thought directly in the president's ear.