Political Quotes

“I stand here as a Senator of New Jersey, but I think I am going to be representing all 100 Senators when I mark this distinctive moment when the Senate will soon go into recess, and we will end a week in the Senate that is not a typical week. It is a week that happens once or twice every year where we say goodbye to a class of pages. And the truth of the matter is, it is a time that is emotional. I have been to a handful of graduations. And even though the pages are spending not even half a year here, the bonds that you experience here, the friendships that you make, the fact that you are participating in something so much larger than any one American is pretty significant. You will have many graduations, I imagine, from high school, from college, some of you from graduate school, some of you from medical school--none of you from clown college, I think, because you lack senses of humor. But the reality is, this is a meaningful departure, a meaningful graduation. And every year, I try to come down to the floor and express my ire at the class. This one particularly has raised my dander--and it is hard to do because I am bald. But this time something different happened because of the extraordinary people who work in this institution, not the Senators but the parliamentary staff. They made the mistake of telling me that in past years, there were poetry competitions.…”