“Substantively Democrats are much closer to where the American people are than Republicans are.”

If you have a sharp bold economic message, you can unite everybody.

We’re going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We’re going to beat guns into submission!

In a brave new world, a post-September 11 world, anyone is going to make certain mistakes. The mistakes that have been made on homeland security, on protecting our Nation from another terrorist attack, are mistakes of omission. We are simply not doing enough.

When you lose an election, you don’t blink, you don’t turn away. You look it right in the eye and say, why did we lose?

Obviously, there are conservatives who are in the mainstream and conservatives who would take people’s rights away.

I think there’s going to be a lot of Americans who are really willing to be much more active than they were before, because they’re worried about where Trump is headed.

Whether you are a Democrat or Republican, whether you are a liberal or a conservative, we know that neither this President nor prior Presidents of both parties did everything right or we would not have had a 9/11.

A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure.

The highest priority you can have is education.

Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that’s not what any of us should want from our judges.

I made education the highest priority of my campaign – actually education and jobs – and the reason is a simple one: I think the future of America depends on it.

I’m still basically an idealist, which translates into getting real things done to make people’s lives better.

Anyone who thinks they have a monopoly on truth, and there is only one way to see the world, always gets us into trouble.

When a nominee doesn’t get 60 votes, you shouldn’t change the rules, you should change the nominee.

The Democratic Party was always there on crime, but in the past we let the ideologues on the left dominate. The Republicans may still let the ideologues on the right dominate.

I went to the public schools myself. And they were great for me.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

It makes sense that if you good in your heart then you closer to God.

Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

Madness is never that far away. It’s as close as saying yes to the wrong impulse.

Here you discover that so long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed.

It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.

It is no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.