Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you’ve got to be wise enough to know when to leave.
A nation has its first obligation to its own workers and its own poor.
America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford.
American public policy is run on a myth.
Politics is a love-hate relationship. I sure know that.
Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop.
I have no permanent enemies – only people I have yet to persuade.
Amnesty is a big billboard, a flashing billboard, to the rest of the world that we don’t really mean our immigration law.
To me, the failure of liberalism – the tradition I come from – was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations.
I had a group of Hispanic Americans come into my office in 1976 who worked in a Denver packing plant. They had just been fired by their employer who turned around and hired illegal aliens for a lot less money. That had a big impact on me.
I think modern societies have to ask a very basic question: What strategies buy the most health for people? Doctors can do so many marvelous things now. They can keep a corpse alive, almost.
I think that retiring the baby boomers is going to be one of the great challenges in America, that you cannot make fiscal sense out of the future of our children without taking on entitlements.
Many seniors understand that Social Security is social insurance as opposed to a program where we put money aside for our own retirement. But most elderly individuals think they’re getting their money back. So it isn’t selfishness as much as a misunderstanding.
Employers love cheap labor, but a country should train its own people.
I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.
A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass.
All we know about the new economic world is that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.
I think we’re rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.
We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation.
The Democratic Party is not the party of reform.