Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Very few things in life are more fulfilling than being part of a team and knowing you're a part of something bigger than your own self-interest.
I don't judge anybody who chose not to serve during Vietnam, at all. It's a different time, and I don't judge anybody for the decision they made.
The president is in charge of the military so that a single individual - accountable to Americans - is responsible for its successes and failures.
Curtailing voting rights by dishonestly inventing widespread fraud has been a major part of the Republican Party's political strategy for a while.
I wasn't out there pretending I was a conservative Democrat. I'm somebody who has talked a lot about and has done the act of running as who you are.
The military is a group of people that come together from different perspectives and backgrounds and places and get a job done because they have a mission.
Politics, as a profession, is not about making the right political decision. It's about making the right decision and then managing the political consequences.
We should be doing everything we can to make it as convenient as possible for eligible Americans to cast a ballot. People fought and died for the right to vote.
Voters are okay with you believing something they don't believe, as long as they think you genuinely believe it, and you believe it because you care about them.
As the state's chief elections officer, it is my job to make sure that only eligible voters vote, but also that every eligible voter has the opportunity to vote.
The secret to adulthood is that 99% of the time, you actually know the right thing to do. Adults make it hard when they are deciding whether to do the right thing.
To me, leadership has always been about doing what's right. Because when you've had to write your blood type on your boots, you aren't afraid to make the right calls.
If you've been willing to put your life on the line to do something important for your country or your state, putting your job on the line is really not a very big deal.
My experience in uniform has shaped my life and informed who I am like no other, and it's difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that I will no longer be a soldier.
Everything I do in my political life is colored by my military service. It was the defining moment in my life and helped me develop the leadership skills that I still utilize.
I launched more formal elections investigations than any secretary of state in Missouri history, and we didn't get a single complaint about voter impersonation fraud - not one.
A lot of states that pass voter ID laws have little to no evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud, which is the only kind of fraud that voter ID laws could guard against.
I realize there are a lot of folks in my political party who disagree with me on this, but I think the Patriot Act is an important law enforcement tool, and it makes our country safer.
That's a compliment reserved only for politicians. You never hear someone say, 'You know what I love about my accountant? He's just a normal guy.' That's how low the bar is for people in politics.
Americans are struck by lightning with greater frequency than they commit voter impersonation fraud, and that's the only kind of fraud that photo ID requirements could have any hope of preventing.
Democrats fell in love with the idea that winning elections was a matter of talking to voters about the one issue we think impacts them, instead of our plan to move the country forward as a whole.
To improve the standard of living for working folks, we have to raise the minimum wage and empower workers to fight for their interests in an economic and political system that's stacked against them.
I signed up for military service in the months following 9/11, and later, as a military intelligence officer, I felt called, like so many others, to volunteer for deployment and service in Afghanistan.
I think that one of the things that Democrats, in particular, need to recognize is that the way we have sometimes thought about issues as just affecting a particular group of people is not necessarily right.
To me, serving wasn't uncommon, and my service paled in comparison to so many of my friends who had done so much more. In my world - as a citizen soldier - I was surrounded by other soldiers just doing their jobs.
We have got to zero in on the fact that all of us, no matter where you live, want our kids' lives to be an upgrade over our own, and we would really like it if our kids could come back and live where we raised them.
If I had the opportunity to give President Trump any advice, and I had to boil it down to one thing, I suppose it would be that nobody ever got better at any job by blaming everybody else whenever anything goes wrong.
A lot of millennials really want a company that signs their paycheck, or whoever it is that signs their paycheck, to be an entity that reflects to them in a way that is consistent with their personal idea of who they are.
No matter how many times the court shuts them down or how many Americans speak out to defend their rights, Republican politicians who stand to gain from suppressing voters won't back down. They'll only change their tactics.
I'm a Democrat because I want every American to have a fair shot at the American Dream. That's what ties it all together for me, and in my experience, that means recognizing that no one is dealing with life one 'issue' at a time.
I am a person who cares deeply about what is happening in the country, and for me, in most ways since getting out of the service, at least, politics has been the way in which I see myself best serving and trying to make things better.
If you're out there saying something that you don't personally believe, then it doesn't really matter if a voter agrees with what you're saying. If they don't believe that you believe it, then they're not going to listen to you anyway.
I've always been somebody who, I stand up for what I believe, and I say what I believe, and that has always worked for me. In Missouri, this is always going to be the case, people are just tired of folks saying what they think they are supposed to say or whatever.
Climate change is a real consequence of human activity and we have a moral obligation to address this challenge. That means reducing carbon pollution and accelerating our transition to clean energy, not only to protect our planet, but also to ensure our national security.
We have to be willing to engage ISIS militarily, economically, and even on the Internet without delay. For instance, I think we waited too long to engage al-Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistan. And we should not make a similar mistake with ISIS elements throughout the world.
I've stood in rooms in urban, rural, and suburban parts of my state and asked a room of middle class voters to raise their hands if the college debt of someone in their family is affecting their financial situation. Without exception, at least three quarters of the room will raise their hand.
Voting in our country has never been easy, and unfortunately, it has never been guaranteed for everyone. But through the work of brave civil rights leaders, some of whom died for the cause, by the early 2000s we were at a point where most, but still not all, people who wanted to vote could do so.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been an adviser to Trump, although he still very publicly couldn't land a job in the president's Cabinet, despite providing that counsel. And Kobach has a long history of making up facts to help him pass unfair voter suppression laws and push extreme anti-immigrant proposals.
Voters are smart. They know the difference between a Democratic Party that wants their vote and a Democratic Party that believes in making their life better. They'll forgive you for pushing a policy they don't like as long as they believe you're doing it because you genuinely believe it's what's best for the country.
The option to recall elected officials is an important one. Our representatives should always be mindful that they answer to their constituents, and if they act in malfeasance, their job may be on the line. But using the recall as a way to reverse the results of an election, or to hold a snap election, is simply undemocratic.
We were at a kibbutz, and we were at a Shabbat service, and I opened up the prayer book, and on the first page, it said that the prayer book was in thanks to the sponsorship of this family in a temple in Kansas City. For me, it was a moment when I really kind of connected in a real serious way with my personal identity as a Jew.
Because President Obama had an overall strategy, military and civilian leaders under his command could make reactive decisions that advanced the president's goals. In the military, we call that commander's intent: When there's a decision to be made and you don't have exact guidance at that moment, you at least know overall what your boss wants.
A lot of people will say to me, they'll say, "When is Trump going to be gone?" People who are thinking that way and are waiting, for those folks I worry that every day when they wake up and Trump is still president, every day is November 9. That's not a good headspace to be in. It just happens to be the case that the best thing you can do to feel better is to be actively engaged in pushing back, and that also happens to be the best thing that you can do for the country right now.
We have so much access to one another through technology and everything else, that we're very much used to people being real. When folks go on TV and they're basically acting - if they were good actors they'd be acting and paid for it for a living, but they're not good actors. When we see bad acting, it doesn't look like bad acting, it looks weird, and we are turned off by it. I'm not talking about anybody in particular, that's just politics right now. This generation, I feel like, has incredible bullshit detectors.
I'm a big believer in you make your argument to everybody, and you do it in a way that is real and very candid. Even if people don't agree with you, they appreciate that you're telling them what you believe and they know that you care about them. That's I think a very important part of it that sometimes gets missed, is that people will be OK with you saying something they're not totally on-board with as long as they know that you believe it because you want to help them. That means you've got to care about everybody.
When we talk about something like student loans, what we should be talking about is the fact that every American wants their kids to do better than we have done. If we can get that, the other thing we'd really like is for our kids to be able to come home and raise their kids in the community where we raised them. What unites all of us, no matter where you live in the country, is we want our family to be safe, we want the next generation in our family to be more successful than us, and we would like our family to be close together.
Whether you have a hundred friends on Facebook or whether you're on TV or whatever, at every level, everybody has a platform. We all have a responsibility, given what's going on, to speak using that platform as much as we can, and to engage. Whether that's calling members of Congress, marching, getting involved locally, getting involved with Let America Vote, or if all you can get done during the day is you see the news and you want to make sure your hundred friends on Facebook know what you think about it, that is a really important part of this.