Top 35 Sam Brownback Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Children of those who have been incarcerated are five times more likely to go to prison than children of parents who have never been incarcerated. The sins of the father visiting the child.”

— Sam Brownback

2. “We are at our best when we help the weakest. The weak make us strong.”

— Sam Brownback

3. “We must take proactive steps to promote democracy and human rights abroad.”

— Sam Brownback

4. “You can look at founding father Alexander Hamilton nevertheless assuring – assuring – the countrymen in Federalist 78 that the role of the federal courts under the proposed Constitution would be limited.”

— Sam Brownback

5. “My dad farmed, my granddad was a farmer. I wanted to be a farmer.”

— Sam Brownback

6. “Let’s create a legal system that can work.”

— Sam Brownback

7. “Narrow scope of judicial power was the reason that people accepted the idea that the federal courts could have the power of judicial review; that is, the ability to decide whether a challenged law comports with the Constitution.”

— Sam Brownback

8. “I do a number of things working on human rights issues, prison recidivism rates, and then I also push and have worked a lot on the social issues of rebuilding the family.”

— Sam Brownback

9. “The court’s injected itself in the definition of marriage, deciding whether or not human life is worth protecting, permitting government to transfer private property from one person to another, even interpreting the Constitution on the basis of foreign and international laws.”

— Sam Brownback

10. “It is far easier to get divorced from somebody you’ve been married to for 10 years and have three children by than to fire somebody that’s worked for you for one year.”

— Sam Brownback

11. “At my core, what I think we need to do is to get the basics right again. We need to rebuild our family structure, stay away from redefining marriage, and stand by marriage as a union between a man and a woman.”

— Sam Brownback

12. “I believe, assume the power to decide more political than legal issues in nature, the people naturally focus less on the law and more on the lawyers that are chosen really to administer the law.”

— Sam Brownback

13. “Everybody has values. Now, you know it may be formed in a secular setting, it may be formed in an intellectual setting, but everybody comes forward with values.”

— Sam Brownback

14. “I believe in the sanctity of marriage.”

— Sam Brownback

15. “You can raise good children in single parent households, and many of you perhaps here today come from that type of environment. It is possible and many do it in heroic situations, but it’s much more difficult and the numbers move against us in a broad society.”

— Sam Brownback

16. “Unborn children can experience pain even more so than adults as the baby has more pain receptors per square inch than at any other time in its life.”

— Sam Brownback

17. “It is time for the government of China to stop holding innocent religious figures in captivity merely for peacefully protesting China’s occupation of Tibet.”

— Sam Brownback

18. “I went to a number of foreign countries, and during whenever I went, I would try to go to an orphanage or a home for children. And I was seeing thousands of kids around the world that needed homes.”

— Sam Brownback

19. “I’d pull my little brother on our motorcycle on an inner tube behind it. We would go fishing, we would hunt some, growing up.”

— Sam Brownback

20. “I’ve been around the government system and believe me it’s built to spend. You’ve got to change the system, otherwise it’s like asking a cultivator to do what a combine does, it just doesn’t fit, it won’t get it done. You’ve got to change the system.”

— Sam Brownback

21. “Common sense should tell us that positively reinforcing sadistic behavior, as these games do, cannot be good for our children,.”

— Sam Brownback

22. “If you get married, you lose all your benefits. That’s insane! We should give people bonuses for getting married, and sending signals and talking about it to the society.”

— Sam Brownback

23. “We must do everything we can to be more aggressive in confronting Syria about what they are doing in Iraq.”

— Sam Brownback

24. “I’m a Ronald Reagan conservative, I’m an economic conservative, I’m strong military. But I also voice and speak and work hard on the social issues.”

— Sam Brownback

25. “The Supreme Court has also issued and never reversed a number of decisions that are repugnant to the Constitution’s vision of human dignity and equality.”

— Sam Brownback

26. “I want to note that, historically, the make-up of the court has changed just as elected branches have change.”

— Sam Brownback

27. “I always think that the party that offers the most hope and ideas for the future is the party that wins.”

— Sam Brownback

28. “The next president needs to know foreign policy and not learn it on the job.”

— Sam Brownback

29. “What I find is most people have a civics book understanding for how Congress works and how a bill moves.”

— Sam Brownback

30. “Most Americans want judges who will stick to interpreting the law rather than making it.”

— Sam Brownback

31. “Everybody will say that they’re not opposed to immigration; they’re opposed to illegal immigration. That’s what I’m saying.”

— Sam Brownback

32. “I enjoyed working with Ted Kennedy.”

— Sam Brownback

33. “I do think there’s a lot more we can do on the life agenda.”

— Sam Brownback

34. “The people believed that while the courts would be independent, they would defer to the political branches on policy issues.”

— Sam Brownback

35. “In recent years, even as the court has become an increasingly political body, the Senate is not focused on preserving any perceived ideological balance when Democrat presidents have appointed people to the court.”

— Sam Brownback

36. “I think we just need to stick to our knitting on the topics and the subjects the American people care about.”

— Sam Brownback