Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I led the fight for the Clinton health care plan in 1994. We failed. I learned from that experience. What I learned is you can't pass a complicated government-run plan.
In every issue there are winners are losers, and the losers are plenty. But they have to be willing to grudgingly accept the result. That's the genius of our democracy.
Hillary Clinton bothers me a lot. I realized the other day that her thoughts sound a lot like Karl Marx. She hangs around a lot of Marxists. All her friends are Marxists.
This is a big deal. My wife and I sat in our home and we watched those young men get slaughtered on the streets of Mogadishu in the absence of a plan. It broke our heart.
Every proposal I'm making, every idea I'm advancing has a single, central purpose: to revive a failing economy and give working Americans the help and security they need.
If you want to run for president, you better be an athlete. It's 24/7. It never ends. You give up your personal life completely and you have something of a chance to be shot.
I was raised in a working class family of Baptist faith, and I went to college on a church scholarship where early teachings were reinforced. Abortion was wrong, I was taught.
Tom Daschle and I worked together on Families First every step of the way, making sure that Democrats in both the House and Senate were involved in putting the agenda together.
My parents wanted me to be a Baptist minister. I was a youth minister in my church when I was still in college. And I was in a lot of theater in high school, and at Northwestern.
I don't believe America will justifiably make an unprovoked attack on another nation. It would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation.
Because the American people champion liberty, more people in the world live free today than at any time in history. Yet, there is more to be done and it is America who will lead the way.
When you succeed (with legislation), that feeling is exhilaration. And it takes leadership from a president, which means you meet with members of Congress 24/7 and you talk and you listen.
I had the honor to meet Nelson Mandela, and I heard him explain his forgiveness of his captors of 27 years by saying hatred and bitterness is destructive - the power is in love and forgiveness.
If I were in the President's place, I would not get a chance to resign. I would be lying in a pool of my own blood hearing Mrs. Armey, standing over me, saying, 'How do I reload this damn thing?'
The sanctity of a woman's right to control her own destiny is a moral force of its own... I came to realize that the question of choice is to be answered, not by the state, but by the individual.
My own view would be to let Saddam bluster, let him rant and rave all he wants. As long as he behaves himself within his own borders, we should not be addressing any attack or resources against him.
George Washington might have become our king, but chose not to. His governing idea was that government is our servant because we are inherently free. It is an idea too many in government today forget.
Conservatives have a deeper intellect and tend to have occupations of the brain in fields like engineering, science, and economics. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to flock to occupations of the heart.
I call it small government, grass-roots activism: The Tea Party activists are a part of it, FreedomWorks is part of it. FreedomWorks is the longest-standing, most active organization within this movement.
My healthcare plan puts more money into average families' pockets than the Bush tax cuts... He's got a lousy tax cut. It's only good for the super wealthy. I've got a tax cut that will help ordinary people.
I don't think you can be a good listener unless you're a good listener. I think it's something that you really have to do, and if you really do it, then you can do it. If you don't do it, then you can't do it.
I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.
America is a great country. We are so wealthy. But our one remaining challenge is to fulfill the potential of all our people. And the only way we can do that is to try to bring everybody together to a higher place.
I think in some cases busing did improve the situation in some areas; in some cases it didn't. We had busing in St. Louis, and it has been ended and we are using other methods of trying to better integrate the schools.
If we know there is enough money in there for nine or ten months, we won't worry too much. They can come back and get more-not all they want, but a large piece of it. So you always have the supplemental as a safety valve.
I've always believed as a value that the government has a vital - not overwhelming, but vital - role to play in furthering human welfare and good. I think we have an important supportive role to play, hopefully intelligent and sensible.
They work in secrecy. I can't get any information. You can't find out anything until they get out to the floor. And it's hard to lick em at that stage. They're a closed corporation. When they stick together, you can't lick em on the floor.
Why would we want to keep a tax cut that's failed? Why would we not want to go back to the Clinton tax code? And why would we not want to help every family more with a health-care plan like mine? Let's help average people. Let's be Democrats.
We know they are doing their job in committee, that they are brilliant men, smart men, and that they are on the job all the time. We're just human beings down here-all different. We take all these things into consideration. You can't help it.
I filed a brief as a friend of the court in the U. of Michigan to keep affirmative action at the U. of Michigan, which I attended the law school. And I was one of the original sponsors of making the Martin Luther King birthday a federal holiday.
We can see beyond the present shadows of war in the Middle East to a new world order where the strong work together to deter and stop aggression. This was precisely Franklin Roosevelt's and Winston Churchill's vision for peace for the post-war period.
I think a lot of people think I was born in a blue suit, on the David Brinkley show. And that isn't me. I am much more that kid who grew up in South St. Louis, in a very modest household, with a simple background with parents who didn't get through high school.
[T]he tax code has been piling up, year after year, a symbol of everything gone wrong in America, of arrogant rulers and lost freedom, just waiting for us to pick the whole thing up and heave it away. It has to happen. Free people can put up with such laws only for so long.
I grew up in a household that was a labor household. My dad was a Teamster and a milk truck driver. My mother was a secretary. Neither of them got through high school. But they worked hard and they gave me very, very important opportunities to go to school, get a good education.
The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air. I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure. I put it down now as basically as paid advertising for FreedomWorks by Beck.
The United States has an absolute duty to attack terrorism where it lives and breeds, in order to prevent future attacks on American citizens around the world. The American people stand united in the face of terrorism. The men and women who undertook this mission deserve our praise and prayers.
After months of lies, the president [Bill Clinton] has given millions of people around the world reason to doubt that he has sent Americans into battle for the right reason. The suspicion some people have about the president's motives in this attack is itself a powerful argument for impeachment.
I grew up in the '50s and '60s when Jack Kennedy was president. We would watch him on television. And our teachers always talked about the good things public servants could do. I thought maybe that's something I should do. So when I got out of law school, my wife, Jane, and I became precinct captains.
Diplomacy matters. Burden-sharing matters. Follow-through matters. And yes, sustaining the peace is harder, more complex and often costlier than winning the war itself. No matter the surge of momentary machismo -- as gratifying as it may be for some -- it's short-sighted and wrong to simply go it alone.
If the economy is still going forward, even at 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour, I think most people will stick with President Obama. I think people look at politics like they hire a plumber. I hire you to fix the bad pipe. If you fix it, I'll rehire you. If you don't fix it, I'm not going to rehire you.
In 1993, as House Democratic Leader, I led the fight to pass the Clinton-Gore economic plan - a plan designed to slash the deficit, invest in education, cut taxes for working families, and ask the wealthy among us to pay their fair share... Not one Republican voted for that plan. They said it was a job killer.
My mother used to say, 'You gotta exercise.' She would really pound on me to exercise every day. She was very physically fit; she was on the basketball team in high school in St. Louis in the 1920s, when women didn't do that. And she taught me to play tennis, taught me to walk and run, and I ran for 30 years pretty religiously.
You don't lock into a ten-year family budget. You take it a year at a time - maybe even six months at a time. And then if the income really comes in the way you hope it does, then you can make some of those expenditures that you've been waiting to make. We think that same principle should apply to the national family we call America.
In 1988, as an unknown candidate, totally unknown, I won Iowa, came in second in New Hampshire, won South Dakota. I was ahead in every Super Tuesday state the day after South Dakota. The only problem was I didn't have enough money. I had a million dollars left, and Al Gore had three and Michael Dukakis had three and it was lights out.
Unlike the Contract with America, which was created by Washington pollsters and insiders, Families First was developed from the grassroots up. Congressional Democrats from across the country spent months meeting with people back home, asking them what issues were important to them, and what Congress could do to make their lives a little easier.
One of the most important virtues of the American character is our ability to approach the complexities that life presents us with common sense and decency, .. The considered judgment of the American people is not going to rise or fall on the fine distinctions of a legal argument but on straight talk and the truth. It is time for the president and the Congress to follow that common sense for the good of the country.
In my view, immigrants today aren't any different from immigrants who have come to America throughout our nation's history. They bring new ideas, an entrepreneurial spirit and close family ties. They place a high value on education. And they are eager to achieve the American Dream. ... It's to our benefit to keep our doors open, and to keep enriching our economy and culture. I'd like to see America continue to do so.
America's Christian conservative movement is confronted with this divide: small-government advocates who want to practice their faith independent of heavy-handed government versus big-government sympathizers who want to impose their version of 'righteousness' on others through the hammer of law.... Our movement must avoid the temptations of power and those who would twist the good intentions of Christian voters to support policies that undermine freedom and grow government.
Government is saying to the average citizen every January 1: 'For the next five months you'll be working for us, for goals we shall determine. Is that clear? After May 5 you may look after your own needs and ambitions, but report back to us next January. Now move along.' ... If nearly half of what you make is spent by someone else, that means that half your work time is spent working for someone else. Call me a radical, but I think that comes dangerously close to being a form of indentured servitude.