Barney Frank, who's served 16 terms in the House representing Massachusetts, announced he will not seek re-election in 2012. He takes with him a masterful legacy, particularly for his work these past 4 years as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and for his co-authoring the Dodd-Frank Reform Act - signed into law in 2010. Major Wall Street Critic. To know him is to love him, and Wall Street got to know him quite well over the years.  While he was a critic, he also openly defended Wall Street firms - with a wit and cantankerous turn of phrase that both attacked and protected the industry he was responsible for overseeing. Dealbook thankfully dishes up some of his greatest hits. On Wall Street’s response to the harsh rhetoric circling the industry: “I hate to say this, but the impression I get most is that their feelings are hurt. Mostly what I get is, ‘Oh, you were rude to us. You said we were fat cats’…Get over it. I’m in the kind of business where people say rude things about us all the time.” - Frank,  as told to DealBook. On the mixed blessings of being Congress’s resident financial expert: “I know more now about repos and derivatives than I ever wanted to know. I hope I’ll some day be able to forget it.” - Frank, as told to Dealbook. On the nature of slow change: “We’ve brought the cost down a little bit in a less orderly way.  I tend to eat when I’m under stress. I want to lose 25 pounds - but not by Sunday.  And that’s how home prices have come down.”   -  Frank, as told to the New Yorker. On marketing the Troubled Asset Relief Program and other bailout legislation: “The problem in politics is this:  You don’t get any credit for disaster averted.  Going to the voters and saying, ‘Boy, things really suck. But you know what?  If it wasn’t for me, they would suck worse.’ That is not a platform on which anybody has ever gotten elected in the history of the world.” -  Frank, to CBS “60 Minutes.” On political motivation, in response to a question about why the White House had not pushed harder for more government intervention during the response to the financial crisis: “[It's] like asking me to judge the Miss America contest - if your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.” -  Frank, to The NYTimes, in 2008.  Mr. Frank was first openly gay member of Congress. On Newt Gingrich‘s suggestion, at a Republican presidential debate, that he should be arrested for his leading role in Wall Street reform: “Apparently, Newt Gingrich - who considers himself one of the intellectual leaders of the free world - is so embarrassed by the fact that he is running behind Michele Bachmann in Republican polls  that it has increased his already well-developed propensity to utter outlandish things.” On the relationship between I.Q. and financial culpability: “No dumb people got America into this problem.  You had to be really smart to understand collateralized debt obligation derivatives.”  - Frank, to The NYTimes, in 2008. On his job as a legislator, and the moment in American liberalism: “We are at a moment now when liberalism is poised to have its biggest impact on America since Roosevelt, because the conservative viewpoint has been so thoroughly repudiated by reality. Someone asked Harold Macmillan what has the most impact on political decisions. He said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ Events have just totally repudiated them, and we’re now in a position to take advantage of that … You know Hegel. Thesis: No regulation at all. Antithesis: Now the government owns the banks. What I gotta do next year is the synthesis.” - Frank, to The New Yorker. On the relationship between legislation and zoology (and in reference to Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican who had sparred with Mr. Frank on a debt-relief provision): “If you want to look at this as one big circus, today is the day that the gentleman from Alabama gets to clean up after the elephants.  And I mean elephants.” - Frank, on the House floor, according to C-SPAN On being everything for everybody: “The notion that this bill doesn’t keep people out of foreclosure is true. It doesn’t combat global warming. It doesn’t get troops out of Iraq. It won’t help me lose weight. There are a lot of things this bill  won’t do that I very much want to do. None of them are a reason to vote against a bill that doesn’t do what it doesn’t say it’s going to do but does what it does. What it does is go to the aid of cities that have been victimized.” - Frank, to The NY Times. And finally, on the role Congress plays in regulating the economy: “We have a very large number of people who, through no fault of their own, have lost everything they have.  Now, I’m a great believer in the free-market system, but I also believe that there are important values that can only be vindicated if we act together through government.” - Frank, to The Boston Globe, in 2005. Thank you. DealBook, for your 11/28/11 collage honoring Barney Frank's 'Words of Wisdom'.  The first of many.