Political Quotes

“I thank my friend John Lewis for yielding. I thank John Lewis for his service to our country, to its principles, to its values, to its people. I thank John Lewis for being my friend, and I thank John Lewis for allowing me for the ninth time to walk with him across that bridge. As I do, I will be holding the hand of John Lewis and holding in my other hand the hand of my 10-year-old granddaughter Alexa. This coming week marks the 47th anniversary of the fateful Bloody Sunday march for civil rights. I want to say to Dan Lungren, my friend, I thank him for the remarks he just gave. They were heartfelt and on target, and the letter from the Birmingham jail to which he referred is certainly one of the great epistles, as he referred to it, to the American people, to people of conscience, to the fierce urgency of now, which he referenced in that letter. On March 7, 1965, our friend and esteemed colleague from Georgia, John Lewis, was among the leaders of that march. It says he was among the leaders. He was the leader, he and Hosea Williams. Two-by-two they walked, some 600, with John and Hosea at the front of the line. That day, in an extraordinary practice of nonviolence, he and other marchers were brutally beaten while trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. They were on their way to Montgomery, the State capital, to protest the murder of a young man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been shot and killed while protecting his mother during a voting rights drive.…”