Top 80 Jennifer Granholm Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes leadership is planting trees under whose shade you’ll never sit.”

— Jennifer Granholm

2. “We cannot wait for the storm to blow over; we must learn to work in the rain.”

— Jennifer Granholm

3. “We honor the dead best by treating the living well.”

— Jennifer Granholm

4. “Often we women are risk averse. I needed the push. Now, more than ever, young women need more seasoned women to provide that encouragement, to take a risk, to go for it. Once a glass ceiling is broken, it stays broken.”

— Jennifer Granholm

5. “Those who devote their lives to serving our country, children, and neighborhoods are giving back. They have answered the call to serve.”

— Jennifer Granholm

6. “America needs to be able to be energy-independent, and the electric vehicle, the battery technology is one way of getting there.”

— Jennifer Granholm

7. “It may be tempting to look back and wring our hands over missed opportunities for change in the preceding decades. But, I’m not interested at looking in the rearview mirror except to learn.”

— Jennifer Granholm

8. “In five years, you’re going to be blown away by the strength and diversity of Michigan’s transformed economy.”

— Jennifer Granholm

9. “Ceremonies are important. But our gratitude has to be more than visits to the troops, and once-a-year Memorial Day ceremonies. We honor the dead best by treating the living well.”

— Jennifer Granholm

10. “I urge you to be bold. Life isn’t changed from the balcony. Get onto the floor and dance, dance, dance.”

— Jennifer Granholm

11. “We need, first of all, for there to be accountability, for there to be somebody who is responsible for enforcing standards and holding people’s feet to the fire.”

— Jennifer Granholm

12. “I love the protest signs protected by the First Amendment – some of them humorous, some of them passionate, some factual, some entirely incorrect – all of them free ideas.”

— Jennifer Granholm

13. “If you don’t have an auto industry, you will not be secure as a nation because you won’t have a backbone like manufacturing to be able to put people to work in producing the means to you keep you secure.”

— Jennifer Granholm

14. “Caring for veterans shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It should an American one.”

— Jennifer Granholm

15. “There’s only so far you can go before you say enough is enough.”

— Jennifer Granholm

16. “We went to a small lake, Bass Lake. It was beautiful. It was perfectly still when we got there in the morning. The fog was lifting off the water. It was just magical. And we did catch some fish, 13 fish.”

— Jennifer Granholm

17. “There’s more technology in your car than there is in your computer. It’s got thousands of parts in it. It’s extremely sophisticated, all that robotics.”

— Jennifer Granholm

18. “There is a gentleness in Michigan that you just can’t replicate.”

— Jennifer Granholm

19. “Voter suppression laws, overzealous filibuster use, you name it – the Republicans use every tactic they can to stop our democracy from actually selecting the person with the most support.”

— Jennifer Granholm

20. “To compete in a global economy, our students must continue their education beyond high school. To make this expectation a reality, we must give students the tools they need to succeed, including the opportunity to take a college entrance exam.”

— Jennifer Granholm

21. “Concentrating wealth in the hands of the few and deregulating financial institutions and practices lead to speculative bubbles that eventually burst – and that brings the whole country down.”

— Jennifer Granholm

22. “With Michigan’s economic future on the line, we can’t afford to have our 500 local school districts marching in different directions. Instead, we need a high standards, mandatory curriculum to get all our students on the road to higher education and a good paying job.”

— Jennifer Granholm

23. “Team Obama continues to dominate new media, spending far more effort and money than Team Romney in targeted online youth outreach.”

— Jennifer Granholm

24. “If you are going to be progressive, then you have to make progress. And that sometimes depends on breaking a few legs.”

— Jennifer Granholm

25. “Don’t mistake niceness for weakness.”

— Jennifer Granholm

26. “California has a beautiful coastline. It can be a rough coastline. The waves are huge. The rocks are steep. Same thing in Vancouver. It has a beautiful coastline. It’s dramatic.”

— Jennifer Granholm

27. “If the person at the wheel refuses to ask for directions, it is time for a new driver.”

— Jennifer Granholm

28. “I am so proud of Michigan’s citizens for the kindness and generosity they have shown in assisting in this endeavor. It is truly heartwarming to see the compassion shown for those in need.”

— Jennifer Granholm

29. “There is no reason why, with the huge potential for market out there in the world for fuel-efficient vehicles, we can’t be the cutting edge for change.”

— Jennifer Granholm

30. “Republicans are definitely pro-birth – they’ll do everything they can to make sure that that baby comes out, regardless of how it got in, but are they pro-life? Can you be pro-life and vote to cut funding that supports the life of a child?”

— Jennifer Granholm

31. “I certainly never thought I would run for office myself. If someone had suggested it, I would have laughed out loud.”

— Jennifer Granholm

32. “The civil unrest of recent days must come to an end, and the healing process must begin for the future of the community. We will provide assistance both in ending the violence and enabling the healing process in Benton Harbor.”

— Jennifer Granholm

33. “When I was fresh out of law school, I had a burning desire to do something important, to have an impact in some way, but I didn’t know what it was.”

— Jennifer Granholm

34. “Bill Ford is somebody who wants to move American auto industry, to lead the nation in making us independent of foreign oil, of making the green vehicle.”

— Jennifer Granholm

35. “We’re on the cusp, on the brink, of enormous change in this country.”

— Jennifer Granholm

36. “Bain also asked Kansas City for a $3 million tax break. The Bain executives were taking home $36 million in borrowed funds and were asking Kansas City to forfeit $3 million in public money for police officers, roads and schools? More free stuff!”

— Jennifer Granholm

37. “This is the place where anybody – like an African American kid raised by a single mom – can be president.”

— Jennifer Granholm

38. “If you are tired of partisanship over patriotism, you need to vote for a change in direction.”

— Jennifer Granholm

39. “Less than a year after loading the company up with debt, Romney and Bain gave themselves bonuses four times bigger than the $8 million they had put into the deal.”

— Jennifer Granholm

40. “We need to continue to make the case that Michigan is where you ought to be.”

— Jennifer Granholm

41. “The most powerful recent innovation in government is when states aggressively use community colleges for retraining. In Michigan, where large numbers of workers were displaced from the manufacturing industry, we created a wildly successful program: No Worker Left Behind.”

— Jennifer Granholm

42. “If you opened up every single potential drilling opportunity in the United States, it would have the effect of lowering gas prices three cents, maybe. And that’s because, of course, oil is traded on a global market.”

— Jennifer Granholm

43. “As a state we are so uniquely positioned in so many ways. Our geography, our placement in the country, and our history positions us to be the state that propels energy efficiency as an industry.”

— Jennifer Granholm

44. “The question is what will Mitt Romney do as president if his policy is simply to be hands off and let the government be made so small it can be drowned in a bathtub. In the 21st century global economy, no state alone has the ability to compete against China.”

— Jennifer Granholm

45. “It’s that Romney is taking advantage of the government’s ‘free stuff,’ too, and has been profiting from it handsomely for a long, long time – even as he rails about the ‘free stuff’ that the government provides other people.”

— Jennifer Granholm

46. “Today in America we are no more ‘post-racial’ than we are ‘post-partisan.’ We have a long way to go.”

— Jennifer Granholm

47. “Studies have shown that since women have had access to the pill and family planning measures, they have made huge gains in both wages and in careers that were dominated by men.”

— Jennifer Granholm

48. “A number of us had conversations with the Kerry campaign about what he was going to say about CAFE. What he told us was that he did not want to sacrifice jobs and that he wanted to work with the auto industry to achieve that goal.”

— Jennifer Granholm

49. “When you get to the extremes there is, sometimes, just the need where you have to stand up.”

— Jennifer Granholm

50. “California is beautiful to look at, but you can’t be a part of it like you can in Michigan.”

— Jennifer Granholm