“Every policy officer is sworn to protect life, and, under the most extreme circumstances, to take life. It is a staggering responsibility that requires officers to make split second decisions.”

I believe the record I was allowed to help establish by the side of the president was important.

Because of the president’s leadership, every American will have access to affordable, quality health care.

I sometimes joke, Paula, even paranoid people have enemies.

For all the things that make Chicago great, for all the things that make us proud to call ourselves Chicagoans, the violence that is happening corrodes our core. It is not the Chicago we know and love.

In the White House, you can be on the pitcher’s mound or you can be in the catcher’s position. Put points on the board. Show people you can govern. Deliver on what you said you were going to deliver on.

When it comes to federal elections law, Tom DeLay and his special-interest friends live by one set of rules, and everyone else lives by a very different set.

The American people want change. They want big ideas, big reform.

I do not believe the government has the right to investigate somebody’s private life.

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually.

Rather than doing the kind of fact-checking that normally goes with a story, you ran with certain stories for not wanting to get beat. There’s a pressure that exists in your profession. I would be surprised in any honest exchange that you say that doesn’t exist.

No citizen is a second class citizen in the city of Chicago. If my children are treated one way, every child is treated the same way.

There are too many senior citizens and good residents in Chicago who are sick and tired of having to walk several blocks out of their way when they leave their homes just to avoid the gangs and drug dealers on the street corner.

In millions of encounters each year between the police and the public, it may be too much to expect that every officer will always get it right. But it is not too much to expect that we can put the right safeguards in place to hold officers accountable when they get it wrong.

I don’t want to go negative on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he didn’t pass an economic deal in the first 100 days. We have passed the largest Recovery Act in the history of the country.

Things happened there that I don’t think are the finest hours for anybody, whether it was a journalist, the legal system or, in that case of the political system, who would say that was an example of when Washington worked best.

There are those who believe justice and dignity are reserved only for some people. Young men have died in police custody, and the growing heel of poverty has worn down harder on children of color…We must fight back.

Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don’t tell them anything.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn’t mean I’m anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.

One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said, “Didn’t you see the stop sign?” I said, “Yeah, but I don’t believe everything I read”

The police must obey the law while enforcing the law.

The most personal thing I’ve put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It’s better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

You cannot undermine police authority and then complain about rising crime.