Top 55 Sheldon Whitehouse Quotes

As a co-founder of the Defend Social Security Caucus in the Senate, you can count on me to continue to stand up for our seniors and fight any back door efforts to cut benefits.

Millions upon millions of secret spending by the fossil fuel industry that was unleashed by the disastrous 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision – this money not only fuels the campaigns of many candidates; it also represents a threat to those who don’t toe the polluter line on climate change.

Protected free speech has boundaries, and one boundary is fraud.

When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.

I think a lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump were frustrated. And what they thought was, OK, government is broken. Therefore, we’re going to send in this incendiary character. And he’s just going to going to bust it all up, and we’ll see what happens.

Our American history reflects a long-standing tension between people and power. In fact, all government everywhere does. But our American form of government solved the problem, better than most, of moderating this tension between people and power.

Most every young man either takes inspiration from his father or wishes he could. I was fortunate in that I could.

Getting past the influence of the fossil fuel industry will take courage, especially on the part of the Republican majority whom they so relentlessly bully and cajole. But we must do it.

If the American people make their voices heard and put enough pressure on Congress, we can restore fairness in our economic system, do what’s right for the middle class, and show that Congress can stand up to special interests.

Every one of us deserves a voice that our president will hear.

Citizens United provided unprecedented political weaponry to big special interests. My personal view was it was calculated to do that.

When I was sworn in, we had Republican-sponsored climate-change bills all over the place. You had John McCain running for President in 2008 on a strong climate platform. You could see American democracy actually starting to work at solving a difficult problem.

Talking to my Senate Republican colleagues about climate change is like talking to prisoners about escaping. The conversations are often private, even furtive.

When we breathe it in, soot can interfere with our lungs and increase the risk of asthma attacks, lung cancer and even premature death. The smallest particles can pass into the blood stream and cause heart disease, stroke and reproductive complications.

The fossil fuel industry maintains a science denial operation and a political influence operation designed to do just that. What’s good for their business is more important to them than what’s good for America.

We are Christian and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and none of the above. We are gay and straight. We are black, brown, white, and innumerable combinations. We are young and old, female and male, with and without disabilities, urban and rural, and liberal and conservative. Every one of us is an equal American.

Every week in the Senate, I give a speech telling my colleagues it is time to wake up to the reality of a changing climate.

The dreadful decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission was the culmination of the Republican appointees’ careful work to open American politics to corporate influence.

Despite heated political debates on the future of our health care system, there is bipartisan agreement that health IT can be a powerful tool to transform and modernize the delivery of health care in our country. Health IT is about helping patients and their loved ones.

How arrogant – how very far from humility – would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly – that’s not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.

Climate change may not be the most important issue to every American, but strong majorities do consider it a major problem, and they aren’t likely to take seriously a candidate who denies the science and who is plainly in the pocket of the polluters.

We would like the rest of the world to look up to American democracy. So when there is this kind of folly taking place, it makes it difficult for other rational nations to look up to American democracy.

Rhode Island works hard to reduce air pollution in our communities. We passed laws to prohibit cars and buses from idling their engines and to retrofit school buses with diesel pollution controls. But there is only so much a single state can do, particularly against out-of-state pollution.

Not only will a carbon fee reduce carbon emissions, it will force big polluters to pay for the damage their pollution does to public health and the environment, generating billions in new revenue for the American people.

Whatever the motivation of the ‘Wall Street Journal’ and other right-wing publications, it is clearly long past time for the climate denial scheme to come in from the talk shows and the blogosphere and have to face the kind of an audience that a civil RICO investigation could provide.

Senators who once supported common-sense legislation have gone silent as stones under the threat of the polluters’ spending.

To be clear, I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

The dirty secret is that climate change is not really a partisan issue in Congress.

The fossil fuel industry has been a particular disgrace, polluting our politics as well as our planet.

Juries are the constitutional institution designed to protect ordinary citizens against the wealthy and powerful.

America’s exceptional nature confers upon us responsibilities. We are not exceptional because we say so; we are exceptional because, over and over, we do exceptional things – things like what Generals Marshall and MacArthur accomplished putting Europe and Japan back on their feet after World War II.

As a Senator from Rhode Island, I wish that once – just once – the fossil fuel industry and their paid-for PR machine would concede that burning their product causes real harm to other people.

In the international contest of ideologies, it is not assured that ours will win; we have to earn the winner’s laurel generation by generation. One way we earn it is by living our values as the world watches.

Across our small globe, dawn sweeps each morning, lighting cities and cottages, barrios and villages. Whoever and wherever you may be, you can step out into that morning sunrise and know, from our American example, that life does not have to be the way it is for you.

Each generation in this country gets the responsibility of being the ambassadors for this American democracy that our parents and grandparents fought, bled, and died for.

At a time when the United States is handing out tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, corporate jet owners, and millionaires and billionaires, it is ludicrous that we would even be looking at Social Security and Medicare as a solution to our debt crisis.

If we believe in an all-powerful God, then we must then believe that God gave us this Earth, and we must in turn believe that God gave us its laws of gravity, of chemistry, of physics. We must also believe that God gave us our human powers of intellect and reason.

Five states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina – have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks – stacks over 500 feet – were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere.

Legislation to level the playing field for working families is dead on arrival in the Citizens United Congress.

The best way to shine a light on all of this ‘dark money’ flooding into our elections would be for Congress to pass legislation requiring all organizations to disclose their political spending in a timely manner.

To a certain extent, platforms are platitudes that you test when you get to govern. You have to run those priorities up against the opposition and decide what’s most important.

We have seen the big loan servicers drag their feet in the Obama administration’s well-intentioned mortgage modification program.

The big polluters are confident in their grip on Congress. They have basically achieved control of the Republican Party, and as a result, they are basically able to block action in Congress that the public needs and the country deserves.

Trapped in the bureaucracy nightmare, real families suffer when the big banks and their servicers force foreclosures. The emotional toll on children packing up their rooms and on parents struggling to find a temporary roof is a deep one.