Millicent Fenwick Quotations

The curious fascination in this job [U.S. representative] is the illusion that either you are being useful or you could be -- and that's so tempting.

If there is one thing the past years have taught us, it is the importance of a keen and high sense of honor in those who handle our governmental affairs.

Influence comes out of the work that you've done and the things you've stood for. Influence and power shouldn't be given to just anybody who wants them.

The money that is spent in elections is absolutely unconscionable - even if it's private money. It's true that one's not corrupted by the expenditure of one's own money, but to some extent the system is. We cannot have a system in which the only people you can count on for a vote that doesn't look as though it might be a vote for a special-interest group are people with enormous fortunes.

Women are on the outside when the door to the smoke-filled room is closed.

When two working people decide to marry, their federal income tax is usually increased. As soon as one spouse earns at least 20 percent of a married couple's total income, the couple pays a 'marriage tax.' ... The United States is the only major industrialized nation in the free world in which the tax cost of the second [married] earner's entry into the work force is higher than that of the first. On one hand, our government's social policy is to help working women earn equal salaries to those of men, but on the other we have a tax structure that penalizes them when they do so.

The essence of good taste is a sense of values, and a sense of values is the pivotal point of good living.

You give bureaucrats power over others, and when the others are poor and helpless, nothing matches government. More than any single exploitive tyrannical force, the possibility of what government can do is absolutely terrifying.

One of the keys to our present definition of good taste is that it is better to be kind than to be 'correct.' There is no situation in which it is smart to be nasty.

In our times, significantly, the three outstanding voices against violence have been silenced by murder - Mahatma Gandhi in India, Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, and Dr. Martin Luther King, here at home.