Top 141 Cory Booker Quotes

I’m very concerned about U.S. food policy.

Everybody wants to find their soul mate, and I’m no different. That’s definitely what I want in the future.

I come from a mother who can cry at a G.E. commercial.

Athletes are still exploited. If they blow out their knee, if they somehow don’t meet the mandates of a coach, they lose their scholarship. They don’t get their degree.

Innovators reimagine our world in so many areas. We need them to help reimagine what government can and should be.

My whole career has been marked by taking on the toughest problems, bringing people together, creating uncommon coalitions to ultimately produce uncommon results – things that people said couldn’t be done.

I just know that I’m innovative. I’m a quick thinker… In Washington, I just want to be a senator who finds a way to drive change and not figure out a way to conform.

I believe that living life with a definiteness of purpose, with having a central focus, is essential to success.

I don’t want to be a race-transcending leader. I want to be deeply understood as a man, as African- American, as a Christian, all that I am.

Patriotism is love of country. But you can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and countrywomen. We don’t always have to agree, but we must empower each other, we must find the common ground, we must build bridges across our differences to pursue the common good.

Stand in a way that you are always empowering people to join in, because the only way to be truly successful is not to succeed as an individual, but to succeed as a part of a community, of a country.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

I live in a working-class community that is struggling at the poverty line, where people who work full-time jobs still at my corner bodega use food stamps. Do you think they care what the stock market’s doing today or what the GDP number is? No.

There was a small point in my life in law school, right before I moved to Newark, when I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I felt so lost.

I want to try to live my own values as consciously and purposefully as I can. Being vegan for me is a cleaner way of not participating in practices that don’t align with my values.

We have a presidential nominee in Hillary Clinton who knows that, in a time of stunningly wide disparities of wealth in our nation, America’s greatness must not be measured by how many millionaires and billionaires we have, but by how few people we have living in poverty.

My family is no different from yours. We may be different from the geography that we come from. Some of you all may pray differently than I do, some of you all may be from a different ethnicity, but we all have the same story.

The greatest natural resource our country has is not oil. It’s not gas. It’s not coal. It’s the genius of our children.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

In America, our differences matter, but our country matters more. That’s the attitude I wanted to take to the Senate.

Elections have consequences. So many people want to complain, but they don’t want to vote. We can talk about Hillary Clinton. We can celebrate her; we can support her, but if we don’t come out and vote for her, for shame.

This world has a way of trying to homogenize you. Trying to sanitize you. Trying to scrub you of your unique divine genius. This world wants to make you regular.

I don’t know what the strategy will be in Washington. The reality is, is, I have got to go down there, as my mentor, as people like Bill Bradley have told me to do, get to know your colleagues on both sides of the aisle, recognize that they, too, beat with the same heart and the same type of blood.

Our platform calls for a balanced deficit reduction plan where the wealthy pay their fair share. And when your country is in a costly war, with our soldiers sacrificing abroad and our nation facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share isn’t class warfare – it’s patriotism.

We’re all tired of a Washington that has these partisan camps where nothing gets done.

We need to look at the totality of the things that we’re labeling as violent and really examine whether we need to have some more proportionality in terms of the punishment fitting the crime that’s done. The bright line that we have right now, between violent and nonviolent, does not account for shades of gray.

I’m intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.

I want to try to live my own values as consciously and purposefully as I can.

I think there’s a lot of folks who believe that this is a time that Democrats have to fight fire with fire. As a guy who ran a fire department, that’s not a really good strategy.

You have to understand the Newark Riots – a lot of people understand that the pain was the initial explosion of anger and alienation, but after that, the response, sending the National Guard troops – a lot of violence was carried out and perpetrated by those who were allegedly coming here to protect residents.

Newark faces real challenges.

As I review the great history of our nation, community organizers have been at the center of so many of our great social movements.

Stay faithful in things large and taking on the world, but stay faithful in those things small – because remember it’s the small things, the size of a mustard seed, that ultimately moves mountains.

Listen, don’t get my Jersey pride going. We are the most densely-populated state in America ’cause some many people who know the secret want to live there.

If we want a great nation, we have to change it ourselves.

We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city.

This November, with the re-election of President Barack Obama, this generation of Americans will ever expand upon the hope, the truth and the promise of America.

No matter who you are, no matter what your color, creed, how you choose to pray or who you choose to love, that if you are an American – first generation or fifth – one who is willing to work hard, play by the rules and apply your God-given talents – that you should be able to find a job that pays the bills.

If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

We’re a nation of hope, of high ideals.

Are there any monuments built to demagogues? I just don’t think so.

Kids born into certain ZIP codes will most likely have certain educational outcomes. And we’ve got to end that. If we end that, we explode economic development.

These false barriers that we’ve erected of space and race, all these illusions that we’ve allowed to infect us like toxins, we’ve got to rid ourselves of that. We are a better nation when we are ultimately united in a common purpose and a common cause.

I don’t know what God has planned for me or you or anyone, but I do know that in darkness, you discover an indistinguishable light.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

Marriage equality is not a choice. It is a legal right.

The change we seek for our nation is not the choice of an individual but must be the calling of a country.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, full-contact, participatory endeavor.

You can’t have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation.

I respect and value the ideals of rugged individualism and self-reliance. But rugged individualism didn’t defeat the British, it didn’t get us to the moon, build our nation’s highways, or map the human genome. We did that together. This is the high call of patriotism.

Minorities do not believe this country will give them a fair shake.

Having people that really reflect the spectrum of American experiences is important to have on the Supreme Court.

The joke I always make is I’m either running for reelection, running for Senate, running for governor, or running for my life. The latter is also a viable possibility.

You were not built for comfort and convenience. You were built to overcome.

It defies logic that protections against predatory debt collection practices don’t apply to debt collectors hired by the federal government.

We are at our best when we give the ultimate sacrifice of putting other people, putting the country, putting our communities ahead of ourselves.

Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

It’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.

A more courageous empathy is needed in our country to see the struggles of people from factory towns to farm towns to city towns who can’t even afford the rent in their cities anymore because costs are going so high.

We’re not called to be a tolerant nation. We’re called to be a nation of love.