Al Jardine's Quotes

I like to be surrounded by harmonies and fullness and richness and vitality.

I love driving; driving along the California coastline is the best drive in the world.

I'm pretty satisfied with how 'Postcard' turned out. I think everybody did a great job.

It took me 29 years to finish that song. That's a typical Jardine move.

Yes, my grandfather worked with Thomas Edison on the electric car, and he sold electric cars at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.

It's a coup by the GOP to grab the governorship to California to make this place a safe haven for George W. Bush in 2004. It's incredible when you think about it. The recall cost the state $100 million.

Music is more of a hobby to me than my hobbies, if that makes sense. I love music; my dad and brother were very musical, and music just happens to be one of my hobbies that became my vocation.

My family and I reside on a non-working farm, although we have a couple of horses and the usual stuff like pigs, cows, and chickens. We really don't have an honest-to-goodness farm, more of a hobby farm.

Ronald Reagan's legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way possible. They often find the best way to do that is to package their product with the Reagan brand.

The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn't do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.

The prison industrial complex is perhaps, at least domestically, the most striking example of us putting profit before people. It all stems from one basic misunderstanding: that the public good can be shepherded by private interests.

The prison industrial complex, to put it in its crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there's what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It's hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise.

The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.

The thing that happens is that politicians run on tough-on-crime rhetoric. You appeal to the public and say, 'Let's put more money into taller fences, tougher laws, tougher sentencing, handcuffs,' and where does that money come from? Well, immediately, it comes out of all the money needed for corrections.

The whole idea of a democracy is that we ourselves, the people, are supposed to make a path of our politics, and it is we who with our feet and our vote and our labors and our vigilance are supposed to shape our country.

To say that Reagan teaches us that we should be against amnesty for illegal immigrants is to contradict what Reagan himself stood for - that he was in favor of amnesty.

War is party-blind. It doesn't care who is in the Oval Office. The forces that drive us to war don't care whether it's Republican, Democrat, or other. The fact is, these parties are prey to special interests. That is something Eisenhower was afraid of.

We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

You can call me an Eisenhower Republican. There is a gigantic gulf between an Eisenhower Republican and the kind of fringe brand of Republicanism that is being so vocally promoted today.

I don't think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don't think he's primarily marvelous; he's complicated.

It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

It was widespread that the politics of Tea Party people would be foreign to Ronald Reagan and they would be seen by him as frivolous and uninformed.

Reagan has very significant things to teach us - positive lessons and quite negative lessons.

Ronald Reagan felt very great regret about the deficits to which he contributed on his watch.

Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He's not the simple, folksy figure that he's often portrayed as.

Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.