The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.
It is not a government’s obligation to provide services, but to see that they are provided.
There are few things more amusing in the world of politics than watching moderate Republicans charging to the right in pursuit of greater glory.
I have no plans, and no plans to plan.
In this life, you should read everything you can read. Taste everything you can taste. Meet everyone you can meet. Travel everywhere you can travel. Learn everything you can learn. Experience everything you can experience.
If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation- unfairly.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Those two principles: We’re supposed to love one another and we’re supposed to work together to make the experience better. That’s all the religion you need, really, to make a success of this planet...
Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions – or whole bodies of religious belief – and government.
For too many, the dream of economic mobility has been replaced with a nightmare of economic stagnation.
The truth is the justice system does need review, there are troubling questions that need to be answered, law enforcement needs to respect the community and the community needs to respect law enforcement.
Democracy is not meant to be efficient, it is meant to be fair.
What I didn’t do was pick one thing and keep saying it over and over again, so I could have gotten credit for it.
We are disgusted by the things that we desire, and we desire what disgusts us.
The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.
The closed circle of materialism is clear to us now – aspirations become wants, wants become needs, and self-gratification becomes a bottomless pit.
We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.
We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn’t distort or promise to do things that we know we can’t do.
We believe in a government strong enough to use words like “love” and “compassion” and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.
I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 – a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below.