United States Senate Quotes

Serving in the United States Senate has been the greatest privilege of my life. ~ Dean Heller

I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States? ... The vice president has two duties: One is to break a tie in case of a tie vote in the United States Senate .. the other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. Neither one of those are very challenging as compared with living a good part of time in the state of Arizona. ~ John McCain

From a policy point of view, I don't think it's the right approach. I don't like the idea of having millions of people here for their entire life without being able to assimilate into America ... From a political point of view, we've got 55 Democrats sent and a 72 percent support for a path to citizenship. It's just not practical to think we'll be able to pass any bill in the United States Senate without a path to citizenship. ~ Lindsey Graham

I have a very strong record on the Environment in the United States Senate. ~ Dan Quayle

The United States Senate wasn't designed to be a majority-rule institution. It was designed to include and accommodate the rights of the minority in small states as well as large states. ~ Olympia Snowe

If the notion on this is we're going to elect somebody to the United States Senate so they can be the 100th least senior person in there and be polite, and somewhere in their fourth or fifth year do some bipartisan bill that nobody cares about, don't vote for me. ~ Elizabeth Warren

I have been immeasurably honored to serve the people of Maine for nearly 40 years in public office and for the past 17 years in the United States Senate. It was incredibly difficult to decide that I would not seek a fourth term in the Senate. ~ Olympia Snowe

A revolution is coming – a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough – but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.

[Report to the United States Senate on his trip to Latin America and the Alliance for Progress, May 9-10 1966] ~ Robert F. Kennedy

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation. ~ Will Rogers

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate. ~ Claire McCaskill

When his nomination comes before the United States Senate, Timothy Batten can count on my strong support ... He is the right person for the job. ~ Saxby Chambliss

Others have said it before me. If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu. And so it is important that we have women in the United States Senate - strong women, women who are there to help advance an agenda that is important to women. ~ Elizabeth Warren

In his years in Washington, Senator Kerry has been one vote of a hundred in the United States Senate - and fortunately on matters of national security he was very often in the minority. ~ Dick Cheney

The bottom line is, there have been a lot of nuts elected to the United States Senate. ~ Chuck Grassley

In the United States Senate, we cannot do great things without reaching across the aisle and working together - and I look forward to the challenges ahead. ~ Richard Burr

Surely the United States Senate is big enough to take self-criticism and self-appraisal. Surely we should be able to take the same kind of character attacks that we "dish out" to outsiders. ~ Margaret Chase Smith

I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed. ~ George Allen

I do think the most important thing we need in leadership in our country, not just in the presidency but in the United States Senate, are people that have a clear vision of what the role of government should be in our lives and what the role of America should be in the world. ~ Marco Rubio

Women are beginning to feel that they are not fairly represented. As we say, 2% may be fine for fat in milk, but not for the United States Senate. ~ Dianne Feinstein

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that? ~ Christopher Hitchens

You know, my name ... comes from the word shomer, guardian, watcher. My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov. And I believe Hashem [Orthodox for God] actually gave me that name. One of my roles, very important in the United States senate, is to be a shomer
to be a or the shomer Yisrael. And I will continue to be that with every bone in my body ... ~ Charles Schumer

I am extremely privileged to serve Rhode Island in the United States Senate, and that is my only goal and aspiration. ~ Jack Reed

I would rather die than be in the United States Senate. I would be bored to death. Could you imagine me, banging around that chamber with 99 other people, asking for a motion on the amendment in the subcommittee? Forget it ... You'd watch me just walk out and walk right into the Potomac River and drown. That would be it. ~ Chris Christie

The reason why I'm here today is to explain why I am running and what I will do if you give me the honor and the privilege of representing you in the United States Senate. Now I'm running for the United State Senate for a simple reason, and that is ... I want to win a Nobel Peace prize. ~ Marco Rubio

The real con artist is Senator Marco Rubio.Who was elected in Florida and who has the worst voting record in the United States Senate. He doesn't go to vote. He's absent. ~ Donald Trump

What is the purpose of public service? It's to solve problems for the people you represent and certainly in the United States Senate, thinking about your state and thinking about your country as well. ~ Olympia Snowe

1992 became known as the 'Year of the Woman' because so many of us were elected to public office that November, including a record six to the United States Senate. ~ Dee Dee Myers

In the United States Senate, one of the things I observed in the early days - and it's still used - and that is that you take someone's argument and then you misrepresent it and misstate and disagree with it. And it's very effective. I've done it myself a number of times. But eventually, eventually people catch on. ~ Edward Kennedy

Well, I was 29 years old when I came to the United States Senate, and I have learned a lot. ~ Joe Biden

The Constitution makes very clear what the obligation of the United States Senate is and what the obligation of the president of the United States is. To allow a Supreme Court position to remain vacant for well over a year cuts against what I think the intentions of the framers are and what the traditions of the Senate and the executive are. ~ Cory Booker

Nobody is going to give away the farm in Kyoto. It is not anybody's to give away. And even if the United States Senate would actually ratify a bad treaty, anything called for under the treaty would require legislation passed through both houses. ~ Thomas Schelling

We must stop the Tea Party before the United States Senate falls into the hands of extremists and ideologues who leave no room for reason or compromise, who don't recognize common ground even when they're standing on it. ~ Harry Reid

For most governors, we find the United States Senate or the United States Congress very frustrating at the slow pace in which they act. There doesn't seem to be a lot of discipline and organization to what they do. ~ Dave Heineman

He took pride in belonging to the world's most exclusive club: the United States Senate. ~ Margaret Truman

I will not seek reelection the United States Senate but will retire from public service in January 2013. There is no reason other than the fact than I think it's time. ~ Jon Kyl

Guess what - I am one of the ONLY senators in the whole United States Senate that is computer literate! ~ Patty Murray

Now I have known Sen. Bill Frist, the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, since he was born. ~ John Jay Hooker

I think it's important that members of the United States Senate spend time not just on Capitol Hill but making contact with ordinary people and engaging them in the political process. ~ Bernie Sanders

Here, dear reader, you must summon patient compassion. Try to imagine the hardships of a military officer triply burdened by close relationships with political leaders and the national news media, an Ivy League PhD, and wartime triumphs leading an elite airborne division. Our hero somehow survived in spite of it all. He rose against his handicaps, triumphing over the awful mark of Princeton University, that great gathering place for outcasts, rebels, and the socially obscure. He secured higher military rank even though he had been successful in combat. He adroitly worked CBS News, the Washington Post, and the United States Senate, yet still rose to prominence. ~ Chris Bray

I will fight in the United States Senate this year to fund a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008, a mission that would potentially increase Hubble's power and efficiency by a factor of 10 and allow us to look back almost to the beginning of the universe. ~ Barbara Mikulski

Class consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite
the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moron
run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron ... ~ H.L. Mencken

We have huge national security issues in this country, and the United States Senate ought to be pushing President [Barack] Obama towards the proper policies that right now are a complete disaster based on his policies. ~ Jeb Bush

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The smartest person in the United States Senate, and he knows it, is John Sununu. Thank God he had his mother's temperament. ~ John McCain

I grew up in a family that nearly lost everything, but I ended up in the United States Senate because I grew up in an America that invested in kids like me and built a real future for us. ~ Elizabeth Warren

I feel that I am best positioned to fight for America's future here in the trenches of the United States Senate. ~ John Thune

I've got the best job in the world being a senator from the United States, a senator from South Carolina in the United States Senate, representing South Carolina in the United States Senate is a dream job for me, but the world is literally falling apart. And we can't get anything done here at home. So that drives my thinking more than anything else. ~ Lindsey Graham

Orrin Hatch is old enough to be my father, and I don't want my father running the United States Senate Finance Committee. ~ Scott Howell

Violence is a problem we all want to solve. I want to make sure that kids learn to deal with anger by learning how to talk with people to solve problems. Here in the United States Senate I want to make sure we have safe schools, safe neighborhoods and good things for kids to do after school! ~ Patty Murray

Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, "forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatsoever. For many reasons - patronage is one, and control of delegations is another - the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders. ~ Robert A. Caro

Barbara Boxer is the most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today. I know that because I've had the unpleasant experience of having to serve with her. ~ John McCain

Since nobody upstages Rudolph Giuliani, his will be a Broadway-class show, perhaps his final bravura performance before November 2000, when he hopes to be turned out of the mayor's office by virtue of his election to the United States Senate. ~ Gail Sheehy

The United States is the only country left now, bar Romania, Bulgaria and Poland, that has this all-government system. ~ John Mica

It's really sad for me that in the United States the Latino community is losing its culture and language, especially among kids born here - a lot of them can't even speak our language. ~ Romeo Santos

Or we could change the definition in another way. We could remove the part of the definition that refers to "supernatural powers." Then sorcery and witchcraft would include beliefs that unknown persons harm others using techniques that cannot be demonstrated to be real or that are not observable. In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy played on people's fears in the 1950s by claiming that the government and Hollywood were filled with Communists dedicated to overturning all that Americans hold dear. In the 1980s and 1990s, various supremacists blamed certain political factions and minorities for social problems and what they believed to be the degeneration of their nation's values. Will there be other witch hunts in the twenty-first century? ~ James Peoples

Our challenge in this regard will be to broaden the scope of our federal funds in terms of international diplomacy, development aid, and international assistance. Many Latinos in the United States look at Latin America and see trouble brewing. ~ Bob Menendez

We just sent our condolences to the President of the United States and the American people on what is a terrible, terrible tragedy. ~ Helen Clark

The era when the United States was the dominant global power is steadily coming to an end, and it must find a way of acknowledging this and framing its ambitions and interests accordingly. Instead of claiming the right to continuing primacy in east Asia, for example, it should seek to share that primacy with China. ~ Martin Jacques

Flag committee chairman Miles did not agree with that sentiment. He opposed adoption of this design and wrote:"There is no propriety in retaining the ensign of a government which, in the opinion of the States composing this Confederacy, had become so oppressive and injurious to their interests as to require their separation from it.It is idle to talk of 'keeping' the flag of the United States when we have voluntarily seceded from them. ~ Clint Johnson

Most Arabs and Muslims feel that the United States hasn't really been paying much attention to their desires. They think it has been pursuing its policies for its own sake and not according to many of the principles that it claims are its own - democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, international law. ~ Edward Said

I would have to have people totally committed to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of this United States. And many of the Muslims, they are not totally dedicated to this country. They are not dedicated to our Constitution. Many of them are trying to force Sharia law on the people of this country. ~ Herman Cain

I have just returned from visiting the Marines at the front, and there is not a finer fighting organization in the world! ~ Douglas MacArthur

The last man to try to run for president advocating a tax increase was Walter Mondale. He lost 49 states in 1984, and the "I'll raise your taxes" reputation haunted him all the way to Minnesota last year, where he lost his 50th state in the Senate election. ~ Dick Morris

St. Augustine is not only the oldest continuously-occupied European settlement on the American continent, it is also perhaps the most haunted city in the United States. Seemingly every spot in this city has some ghostly hidden history, right below the surface. Just by strolling through the historic streets you can hear the whispers of the long-dead. ~ James Caskey

Our obligation to the world is, primarily, our obligation to our own future. Obviously, we cannot develop beyond a certain point unless other nations develop, too. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Jesus was not crucified for being a good citizen, for being just a little nicer than everyone else. The powers of his day correctly saw him and his followers as subversives because they took orders from a higher power than Rome or Jerusalem. What would a subversive church look like in the modern United States? ~ Philip Yancey

A great nation like the United States has many and varied interests, and we need both to do business with tyrants and to engage constantly in multilateral diplomacy. ~ Elliott Abrams

I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. He's worse than Castro was. He won't shut up. Then he told me that he didn't think the United States landed on the moon and didn't believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. He's a wacko. ~ Christopher Hitchens

This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

There are 20,000 Muslim physicians in the United States, Americans putting their lives in the hands of Muslims every day. ~ Hamza Yusuf

And that John F. Kennedy uttered the first variation of "ask not what your country can do for you" in Detroit on Labor Day in 1960. So Detroit was really central to Democratic politics United States. Every Democratic candidate would start their fall campaigns in Cadillac Square. ~ David Maraniss

Beyond that is the fear that the United States will end up negotiating and agreeing to a deal with Iran. The Israelis do not like that either because they fear the deal will come at the expense of Israel's security interests. From an Israeli perspective, the NIE makes the risk of some sort of settlement much greater. ~ Trita Parsi

Ethan got some books out of an old trunk. They were history books, some passed down from his great-grandfather Tom through his grandfather Jeb and father Andrew. Ethan expected that he'd pass them on to his own child, one day. History and family trees had always been very important to the Fortner family. ~ C.G. Faulkner

I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty. ~ Christopher Hitchens

During my travels in Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Europe and all over the United States, I have seen and heard the voices of people who want change. They want the stabilization of the economy, education and healthcare for all, renewable energy and an environmental vision with an eye on generations to come. ~ Michael Franti

About 2500 years ago Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, wrote, He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. These remarkable photos and the stories that accompany them should be on billboards from sea to shining sea, so the pain and suffering they represent might fall drop by drop upon the American psyche and against our will, by the awful grace of God, wisdom might come to these United States and her foreign policy. ~ Gioconda Belli

We feel prepared to face the reality of restoration. We walk into town for coffee and telephone Piero Rizzatti, the geometra. The translations "draftsman" or "surveyor" don't quite explain what a geometra is, a professional without an equivalent in the United States - a liaison among owner, builders, and town planning officials. Ian has assured us that he is the best in the area, meaning also that he has the best connections and can get the permits quickly. ~ Frances Mayes

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

Bill, The United States is not a company. It is a country. ~ Stewart Alsop

The United States should pursue a more robust agenda for U.S. competitiveness and innovation focused on a lower-carbon economy, including investments in education, basic research and development, infrastructure, retraining, retirement security, and universal health care. ~ Mona Sutphen

The United States is broke - fiscally, morally, intellectually - and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is. ~ David Stockman

According lecture, entire effort United States to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The United States wanted to send its trained rebel groups to Syria to fight ISIS. Out of twenty-five hundred rebels they had trained, only seventy accepted to go to Syria to fight ISIS. Everybody else wanted to go to Syria to fight the government. So you've got to wake up and smell the coffee ... The rebel groups have not fired a shot against ISIS. ~ Mohammad Javad Zarif

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness ... towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those fore hundred identical balconies is the one outside of Martha Mitchell's apartment ... Ah ... Nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The United States is imposing sanctions on individuals and companies working to advance Iran's ballistic missile program, and we are going to remain vigilant about it. We're not going to waver in the defense of our security or that of our allies and partners. ~ Barack Obama

Delta Airlines recently proposed giving frequent flyers a controversial perk: the option of paying $5 extra to speak to a customer service agent in the United States, rather than be routed to a call center in India. Public disapproval led Delta to abandon the idea. ~ Michael J. Sandel

The United States need to put internet processes, policies, and procedures in place with real laws that forbid going beyond the borders of what's reasonable to ensure that the only time that we and other countries around the world exercise these authorities are when it is absolutely necessary. ~ Edward Snowden

There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases; in countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate of cancer is half what is in the United States. ~ Michael Pollan

There is no verb for compassion, but you have an adverb for compassion. That's interesting to me. You act compassionately. But then, how to act compassionately if you don't have compassion? That is where you fake. You fake it and make it. This is the mantra of the United States of America. ~ Dayananda Saraswati