“[Vladimir] Putin is an enemy of political dissent. The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places where our ideas are in conflict.”

The U.S. affirms freedom of speech.[Vladimir] Putin is no friend of freedom of speech.

The vast majority of that is health entitlements – Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid. There’s also Social Security, interest on the debt. But fundamentally, health entitlements are the thing that will bankrupt our kids. We need to fix that for the long-term.

What happens in Senate fight club stays in Senate fight club.

What’s more constructive for our kids is to go on a case-by-case basis, evaluating particular policies.

I think I’m one of five people in the Senate who’s never been a politician before. And now that I am a politician, what I find weird about it is that I respect myself less.

[Vladimir] Putin is an enemy of the free press. The U.S. celebrates free press.

So [Vladimir] Putin is a mess. He’s committed all sort of murderous thuggery, and I am opposed to the way Putin conducts himself in world affairs, and I hope that the president also wants to show moral leadership about this issue.

There is no equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in [Vladimir] Putin’s defense of his cronyism. There’s no moral equivalency there.

I didn’t go to Harvard because I thought they had good academics. I went because they had crappy enough sports so they’d let me play.

People think if they voted for somebody, they should reflexively defend everything they do or say. And if you voted against somebody, you should just as reflexively oppose everything they do or say. It’s not very helpful.

Putin has as one of his core objectives fracturing NATO, which is one of the greatest military alliances in the history of the world.

he U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places or ideas that are in conflict.

In the American constitutional system of three different branches, conflict – and I mean that peaceful, vigorous debate – it’s a feature of our system, not a bug. We need less all-or – winner-take-all politics.

I don’t understand what the president’s [Donald Trump] position is on Russia. But I can tell you what my position is on Russia: Russia is a great danger to a lot of its neighbors, and [Vladimir]

The real number of the US’ obligations, unfunded obligations that we’re passing on to our future generates is more like $70 trillion to $75 trillion.

We obviously have to honor the commitments that have been made to the people who are already retired or near the retirement age. But we need to tell the truth about the fact that when we set the retirement age at age 65 in America, life expectancy was only 62.

Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.

Dealing with the health of people is more important than political considerations.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

Political decisions are never random and will always lose out to innovative alternatives.

People in our so-called Rust Belt have lost out, and politics and society have not been responsive either in providing the kind of additional support they need or to retrain them for jobs that are being created in the new economy.

We have two political parties in this country, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I belong to the Stupid Party.

I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.