Political Quotes

“Mr. President, today is a special day. It is Earth Day. I had the privilege of actually being at the first Earth Day, at Golden Gate Park, a million years ago. The speaker there that day was Ralph Nader, and there was a huge crowd. Hundreds of thousands of people were there. Ralph Nader made a lot of fame and fortune writing a book called ``Unsafe at Any Speed,'' about the Corvair Monza. That was my first car, a Corvair Monza. And as he was there speaking that day, I couldn't help but think about how much I loved my Corvair Monza and couldn't believe he wrote that book about it. He actually made a lot of sense and, certainly, it was a rallying point for people in this country who realized that we were going the wrong way in terms of the cleanliness of our air and the cleanliness of our water. I had gone to Ohio State and was a Navy ROTC midshipman there, and I ended up in Southeast Asia. I remember being over in Southeast Asia on one of our deployments, and the Cuyahoga River, up the road from Ohio State, in Cleveland, OH, caught on fire. They had too many people drinking the dirty water. I liked to run outside. I know our Presiding Officer is a big athlete as well. I know there were days that I would run outside, in the 1960s and 1970s--and in some places, even now, around the world--and I was doing more damage than good by breathing the air in those places. But some amazing things happened in 1970, right around 1970.…”