Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from New Jersey. During the course of one of his political campaigns, Abraham Lincoln's opponent said to him: You have switched your position. You have reversed your position on an issue. You have changed on an issue. Abraham Lincoln said: It is true. You see, I would rather be right some of the time than wrong all of the time. Well, I learned that lesson, as many of us have who have served in Congress, when you vote for a measure and, many years later, have to reflect on whether it was the right vote. I voted for something called the War on Drugs. It seemed like a sensible thing to do, and many joined me: Black and White Members of the House of Representatives. It was after the death of Len Bias, the Maryland basketball star who overdosed. In the moment of panic over crack cocaine, we did something which was going to just make a very clear public statement. The penalty for crack cocaine was going to be 100 times the penalty for powder cocaine--100 times. We were going to let America know: Don't mess with crack cocaine. What a colossal failure it turned out to be. The price of crack cocaine on the street went down instead of up; the number of users on the street went up instead of down; and we filled the prisons of America, over the next 10 years, to a level we had never seen before, primarily with African Americans who had been convicted of possessing and selling crack cocaine.…”