Political Quotes

“I heard the rhetorical question the Senator posed to the body, and it involved a direct question about how my family would have confronted those challenges, so let me back up and talk about that for a second because while it is my family--and I always refer to it--the reason why I got in politics and my view of the issues of the day are all framed through my upbringing, as all of ours are. You cannot escape where you come from or what you were raised around. It influences the way you view the world and the way you view issues, and the experience my family had has influenced me. I earlier talked about the student loans I once had. I paid them off last year, by the way, with the proceeds of a book, which is available now in paperback, if anyone is curious. But anyway, all joking aside, when I wrote that book, it required me to go back and learn a lot more detail about my parents. Because like anybody else, when you grow up you listen to your parents talk and you kind of repeat it to other people, but when you are growing up and you are in a hurry, you do not always have time to sit down and listen to the details. This actually forced me to go back and learn details about their lives. What ended up happening is I ended up meeting and discovering two people whom I never knew. I knew something about them. I had grown up with them. But I knew my parents in their forties and fifties. I did not know them in their twenties and thirties.…”