Money is not the only answer, but it makes a difference.

This budget tells our veterans that if they want increased funding for the VA they’ll have to pay for it themselves.

lift this candidate up.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, now you have these dispersed power centers, … They are clearly still working out the kinks.

We were in a lounge with a locked door at one point,

The Bush Administration’s failure to be consistently involved in helping Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians has been both wrong for our friendship with Israel, as well as badly damaging to our standing in the Arab world.

In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those...

‎Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who...

How does the saying go? When two locusts fight, it is always the crow that feasts.’Is that a Luo expression?’ I asked. Sayid’s face broke into a bashful smile. We have a similar expression in Luo,’ he said, ‘but actually I must admit that I read this particular expression in a book by Chinua Achebe....

Yes We Can!

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

I would like to see him (Bush) reach out to a broader circle of leadership in the African-American community and indicate that what he saw woke him up,

I am very impressed with his intellect, … He strikes me as a good and decent person but he is still following instructions, which is to say as little as possible on some core issues about how he would decide cases.

Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees...

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountain top and pointed the way to the Promised Land.Yes we can!

A nation that can’t control its energy sources can’t control its future.

No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics–the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.

They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street....

A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and...

And then, on September 11, the world fractured.It’s beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow–the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I...

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns in to universal, rather than religion-specific, values… it requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.Now I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot...

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

the underlying struggle – between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and...

Kita menganggap keimanan sebagai sumber kenyamanan dan pemahaman, tetapi mendapati ekspresi kita akan hal itu justru menyebarkan perpecahan. Kita percaya, diri kita adalah orang-orang yang toleran meskipun berbagai ketegangan rasial, agama, dan kultural mencemari lanskap kehidupan kita. Dan alih-alih berusaha menyelesaikan atau memediasi konflik ini, politik kita justru mengipasinya, mengeksploitasinya, dan menjadikan kita terpecah-belah.

The stakes involved in Washington policy debates are often so high– whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward– that even small differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperative of campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media...

Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach,...

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our Democracy; Tonight is your answer.

But know this America: we will meet them

To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress...

Some of that means that in your public statements, … you end up trafficking in public platitudes more than you’d want to do at home.

When students participate in debate, they learn to study issues in depth and from perspectives, a skill I use everyday in the Senate.

We thought it was wrongheaded and the amount of anxiety caused by this review was significant, … We stopped the VA from going backward, but we still need to move forward.

To provide an additional $50 billion in capital gains and dividend tax breaks over the next 10 years, while permitting many of these taxpayers to shirk their responsibility to pay their fair share of taxes is a moral outrage that should not be allowed to happen.

I think the bigger question is going to be ‘How do we provide longer term housing and employment opportunities?

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation – not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power–and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness...

I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about...

And that’s the work of your generation. As long as more walls still stand…We’ll need more of you, young people, who imagine the world as it should be; who knock down walls; who knock down barriers; who imagine something different and have the courage to make it happen. The courage to bring communities together, to...

We are the change we have been waiting for.

We must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side; and yet at times we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.

When I see Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously. I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses.

I am extremely wary of this unnecessary and costly review of settled PTSD cases, … The veterans who received full benefits for PTSD are some of those who need our help the most.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

These shells behind us, these casings, are a testimony to the decades that have been spent creating weapons of destruction, … The hopes in the programs that have been discussed today are that we can start using our resources to dismantle these arms and create a more peaceful and safe future for the people of...

I also think the media’s presence simply raised the question: If the media could get to these places, why couldn’t the federal government?

What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in...