Top 60 Jerry Brown Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Organic farming is about buying out of a corrupt, illegal and dishonest system.”

— Jerry Brown

2. “Inaction may be the biggest form of action.”

— Jerry Brown

3. “Life simply is. It follows its course. Give yourself to the moment. Let life reveal itself to you.”

— Jerry Brown

4. “My principles are simple. Protect the Earth. Serve the People, and Explore the Universe.”

— Jerry Brown

5. “The CIA was revealed to be spying in France, not for military purposes, but for corporate purposes. So this $30 billion spook agency is now at the disposal of these oligarchic corporate structures run by the 1%.”

— Jerry Brown

6. “The war on drugs is really no war at all – it’s a business!”

— Jerry Brown

7. “Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.”

— Jerry Brown

8. “Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness.”

— Jerry Brown

9. “Basically, if you have above-average intelligence, you have common sense and you can speak in front of a camera and to a crowd, you can govern the state.”

— Jerry Brown

10. “We’re going to move left and right at the same time.”

— Jerry Brown

11. “You’ve got the oil companies fighting Pope Francis. Fighting the scientists of the world. Fighting the governor of California. They are engaged in literally a life-and-death struggle, and I have no doubt who is going to be the victor.”

— Jerry Brown

12. “Prisons don’t rehabilitate, they don’t punish, they don’t protect, so what the hell do they do?”

— Jerry Brown

13. “The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals, Nazi-style.”

— Jerry Brown

14. “We’re being ripped off and screwed by a bunch of liars, thieves, crooks, and criminals, and they’re not the folks below. Don’t look in the streets, look in the corporate suites.”

— Jerry Brown

15. “The shuttle tomorrow is truly like laying the last spike on the transcontinental railroad, only much more so. And whether or not we’re going to see in in the next 10 or 20 years, there are people alive today who will see manufacturing in space from moon materials or from asteroids.”

— Jerry Brown

16. “We have to restore power to the family, to the neighborhood, and the community with a non-market principle, a principle of equality, of charity, of let’s-take-care-of-one-another. That’s the creative challenge.”

— Jerry Brown

17. “The reason that everybody likes planning is that nobody has to do anything.”

— Jerry Brown

18. “So we are being systematically trained to fear this false ‘rising crime’ tide. This is all part of a system to lock up more people, and impose more control and surveillance.”

— Jerry Brown

19. “The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government.”

— Jerry Brown

20. “The big lock-up is about drugs. Here’s the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners.”

— Jerry Brown

21. “I’ve been in office and I’ve been out of office. And if I were to choose, I’d rather be in office.”

— Jerry Brown

22. “Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void.”

— Jerry Brown

23. “I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don’t feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.”

— Jerry Brown

24. “The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don’t think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.”

— Jerry Brown

25. “I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.”

— Jerry Brown

Featured in: Strong Quotes

26. “Look at the whole criminal correction game, which is a big piece of our economy. It’s just an invention. Crime is being invented to put people to work.”

— Jerry Brown

27. “A lot of street crime is horrible, but in terms of the dislocation, the undermining of the family – the corporate criminals, many of whom reside in Congress and the White House – are getting away literally with murder.”

— Jerry Brown

28. “We are in a degenerate state of self-government. In fact, even to use the words self-government, is not only an exaggeration, it’s a lie. It’s a big lie!”

— Jerry Brown

29. “It doesn’t matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.”

— Jerry Brown

30. “The sovereignty of America has just been eroded in plain daylight by Clinton and the Congress, who take an oath to the Constitution. Those criminals continue to destroy this country and the world itself.”

— Jerry Brown

31. “Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.”

— Jerry Brown

32. “We have to be realistic about what the state can afford, and put an end to abuses of the system that cost millions.”

— Jerry Brown

33. “Let’s draw the boundary early not wait until it’s obvious like Hitler’s Germany and insist that the state shall never, never, take the life of a person!”

— Jerry Brown

34. “There’s nothing wrong with being an anarchist.”

— Jerry Brown

35. “Taking significant amounts of carbon out of our economy without harming its vibrancy is exactly the sort of challenge at which California excels.”

— Jerry Brown

36. “At least when I was govenor, cocaine was expensive.”

— Jerry Brown

37. “The government is becoming the family of last resort.”

— Jerry Brown

38. “When I was Governor, Louis Kelso went out of his way to brief me. I was very impressed, but I was never able to get any of the economists in state government to give him the help his plan deserves.”

— Jerry Brown

39. “The whole Jeffersonian ideal was that people are temporarily in government. Government is not the basic reality. People are. The private sector. And government is just a limited power to make things go better.”

— Jerry Brown

40. “I understand we have to keep a significant amount of fossil fuel in the ground. I’m committed to that. But I’m not going to just all of a sudden try to stop the cars of California or to increase dramatically the number of ships carrying oil into the state when we already have our own production.”

— Jerry Brown

41. “This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system.”

— Jerry Brown

42. “Here the system is creating an industry around the drug issue when it does nothing to stop the corrupt military that moves the drugs, and the big banks that are all in cahoots with the President and the big shots in the Congress.”

— Jerry Brown

43. “The corporation is an out-of-control Frankenstein.”

— Jerry Brown

44. “The great problem with government is that it never goes bankrupt.”

— Jerry Brown

45. “We’re not going to have a backlash. We’re going to build a consensus. And I live in the real world, not the kind of fantasy goals that we would all like, but we would never achieve if we go about it in the blunderbuss fashion that your question would assume.”

— Jerry Brown

46. “Nuclear power will be the Vietnam issue of the 1980s.”

— Jerry Brown

47. “California is the third largest oil producer. More importantly, California burns more oil, consumes more oil than any state or collection of states in America.”

— Jerry Brown

48. “Pension reform can be hard to talk about. In the long run, reform now means fewer demands for layoffs and less draconian measures in the future. It’s in the best interest of all Californians to fix this system now.”

— Jerry Brown

49. “We’re going to get that little bug before that little bug gets my poll ratings down any further.”

— Jerry Brown

50. “In some cases, managers and employees have secured pensions beyond their original base salary. It is wrong, the people doing it know it’s wrong, and we have to put an end to it.”

— Jerry Brown