Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Background checks applied universally and nationally would take millions of illegal guns off the streets of our cities.
You can just assume that better law enforcement response is going to quell the epidemic of gun violence in this country.
Too many families know what it's like to have to choose between providing care for a family member and keeping their job.
Terrorist groups are working and communicating across E.U. borders - our efforts to track those groups must do so as well.
Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East - an addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn't.
Donald Trump has a lot of supporters with a deep hatred of Hillary Clinton and access to incredibly powerful lethal weapons.
Ultimately, stability in Syria will come from decisions made on the ground by the Syrian people and by their immediate neighbors.
Participatory democracies. Open economies. Web-based communication. All American innovations to the great conundrums of the globe.
For far too long, Washington has denied the American citizens of Puerto Rico vital human services and adequate health care funding.
There are numerous groups across the country, both local and national, that are working to prevent gun violence in our communities.
There is just no substitute for seeing a disaster area firsthand and getting the chance to speak in person to victims and responders.
We have a cleaner system of government in this state where people run based on their ideas, not based on their ability to raise money.
American foreign policy needs to be driven by what will get results and what is legal, not by what satisfies our primal instincts of revenge.
The anti-gun-violence movement was essentially asleep from 1994 to 2012, and during that time, the gun lobby built up enormous political power.
In Connecticut, we have passed some of the strongest anti-gun-violence laws in the nation. We don't restrict anybody's Second Amendment rights.
The Mental Health Reform Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2016. It was one of my proudest moments in Congress.
Congress should pass legislation that mandates increased information sharing for any country that wants to participate in the Visa Waiver Program.
I would respectfully disagree that the right to own a military-style weapon is a God-given right. I didn't see that anywhere in the Bible that I read.
Rarely do political contributions lead to direct quid pro quo transactions - donations for votes - and those that cross this line normally get caught.
The European Union needs a comprehensive, continent-wise, transnational counter-terrorism center that has the authority to track threats across borders.
I will consider my time in the Senate a failure if we don't pass some meaningful legislation to reduce the likelihood that Sandy Hook ever happens again.
Most elected officials don't want you to know about the world of political fundraising because they fear that it paints an unflattering portrait of public life.
One of my chief criticisms of U.S. international policy is that Congress has largely abdicated its foreign policy-making responsibilities to the executive branch.
Republicans are going to have to come to the conclusion that there's a political price for standing against 90 percent of their constituents to stand with the gun lobby.
At some level, Trump is more radical than the NRA. In the wake of Orlando, he was calling on people to walk into bars fully armed as a means to prevent future tragedies.
As lawmakers, our job is to listen to our constituents. If our phones are ringing off the hook with people demanding to know where we stand on an issue, we pay attention.
Social media is such a key organizing and communication tool, and I've made a major commitment to use it as a way to make the legislative process as transparent as possible.
It can be frustrating that, despite widespread support for common sense gun safety measures, Congress is moving at a snail's pace. But remember that great change takes time.
Our nation, in a short quarter-millennium, catapulted itself to global preeminence by solving the world's greatest problems and exporting those solutions to the rest of the world.
The Choose Medicare Act will let people of all ages buy into Medicare as their health care plan, and it would let any business also buy into Medicare and offer it to its employees.
If you were a Democrat getting ready to run for office in the 2000s, as I was, you were told to stay clear of guns... I really regret that. I regret having listened to that advice.
I arrived in Hartford as a 25-year-old naive state legislator who believed in universal health care. I rose to become the 29-year-old Chairman of the legislature's Health Committee.
Living in stressful situations there are chemicals in your brain that are released that essentially degrade the neuron connections that allow you to function as a normal human being.
Frankly, when you twin the language of assassination threats with Donald Trump's suggestion that a Hillary Clinton electoral victory would be illegitimate, it scares the hell out of me.
You can only explain America's gun violence problem through guns, because mental illness doesn't automatically lead to violence, and it doesn't lead to violence anywhere else but America.
We have a long, proud history of making things here in Connecticut. We're home to large companies like Electric Boat, Pratt & Whitney, and Sikorsky, as well as their thousands of suppliers.
I don't require a background check to contribute to my campaign. And so there are probably lots of people with unsavory backgrounds and pasts who have given to both Democrats and Republicans.
There's no more personal issue than gun violence; every one of these stories is a life lost, i'm hoping that over the long term, as I tell these stories, that it will help to open people's eyes.
The political alliance between the House of Saud and the conservative Wahhabi clerics is as old as the nation, and the alliance has resulted in billions funneled to and through the Wahhabi movement.
America doesn't have the moral authority or weight to tip the scales in this fight between moderate Islam and less tolerant Islam. Muslim communities and Muslim nations need to be leading edge of this fight.
America's strength in the past has been our ability to bring family members to join other family members in the United States and to look at skills but not have it be the only determination of how you get here.
If [lawmakers] lose elections in part because of their votes on the background-check bill or their position on the terror gap bill, then there will be a rethinking of this issue within the Republican conference.
It would be devastating for America if Donald Trump won, and it would be devastating for the anti-gun-violence movement. But we would be on a long list of progressive causes that would be shattered by a Trump win.
The United States has the best intelligence-gathering operation in the world. We should provide a greater level of training and assistance to the E.U. to help them develop a more robust counter-terrorism platform.
The world is a mess, and while there is no simple pill America can administer to fix things, what we know is that there is significant room for progressives to articulate a foreign policy vision that is truly our own.
It's a wonderful story for the gun lobby to tell that if you just load up schools with weapons, you'll be safer. All of the evidence suggests that homes and communities that have more weapons have more gun crimes, not less.
Helping people get the skills they need to set them up for a rewarding career helps keep people in Connecticut, and it ensures that we have a workforce that's ready to fill the thousands of manufacturing jobs of the future.
I grew up in a pretty economically safe, physically safe household, and, you know, now my life is defined by other people's trauma and by other people's emotional experience with it, and I think I'm richer for that, frankly.
What we do in Connecticut is ban assault weapons. We ban high-capacity magazines. We have true universal background checks, and we require everybody to get a permit from their police department before they can carry a pistol.
People should remember that in the 2000s, the gun lobby got a lot passed: they got riders added to appropriations bills. They got immunity for the gun industry. They successfully managed the expiration of the assault weapons ban.