Democracy
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- Jail is just another micro-society. It just happens that here, the problems are far more out in the open, we don’t live with the facades of lies that democracy or capitalism creates for us.
- I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s**t that you feel sorry for me. Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.
- Being a patriot doesn't mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries.
- These are children we are talking about - not just numbers, not just data, not political pawns. And, although most may not meet the refugee threshold needed to stay in the United States, many may. How are we supposed to hold our heads high on humanitarian issues if, in our haste for a fix and our fixation on deterrence, we return even a few children to a place where their lives are in danger?
- I felt like it was important for me to try to connect those dots to my legislative colleagues, so that they understand that these are real lives that we’re talking about - that they’re not just words on a piece of paper. That the decisions that we make absolutely affect young people every single day. And that I very much could have been helped if things had been different for me.
- The Senate used to be a place of great debate and accomplishment. Now it is run like a dictatorship shutting out the voices of millions of Americans.
- I just am a believer...that there are some things that happen for a reason…We may not be able to really discern it now…[but] given the perspective of time, I think we’re going to be able to look back at this, and what seemed really bad at the time may turn out to be really good.
- People call me a socialist sometimes. But, no, you gotta meet real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a socialist is.
- Constant conflict is actually often good politics, because the more you can inflame your supporters the more likely they are to show up at Election Day. And if they’re more inflamed than the other side, even if the other side has more people agreeing with it, you’ll win, because your crowd will show up.
- Shutting down the government, in my view, is not conservative policy. I don’t think a two-week paid vacation for federal employees is conservative policy. A number of us were saying back in July that this strategy could not and would not work. And, of course, it didn’t. So there’ll not be another government shutdown, you can count on that.
- This is why I think the shutdown was so magnificent, run beautifully. I’m so proud of these Republicans….Obamacare is very unpopular. If you want to overturn it, America, vote for more Republicans. We need to take the Senate.
- It is a law of nature that everything run by the government will get more expensive and worse over time. Everything run by the private sector will get better and cheaper over time. The fact that [Obamacare] starts this badly does not bode well….We want healthcare run on the same system that gave us cell phones, flat screens, Jerry Garcia chia pets. Everything you submit to the free market…keeps getting better and better.