Political Quotes

“18 years ago today, in my office in Oklahoma City, a fellow staff member poked her head into the office and said to me: There is a freak accident that has happened in New York. A plane flew into the World Trade Center. She went down the hallway and pulled in a rolling cart--the younger generation will have no idea what that is--but a rolling cart with a TV on top of it, and we plugged it in and watched it. As the second plane flew in, both of us stood there silently, thinking: That is no accident. That is murder on a massive scale and terror like I have never witnessed with my own eyes. What I didn't know at that moment is how many thousands of lives would be affected and how much our Nation would be changed. That morning, 18 years ago, seven Oklahomans died, but our Nation was forever changed. Common terms we think about today like ``TSA,'' or ``terror watch list,'' or ``Department of Homeland Security,'' or ``Global Entry,'' or ``body scanners,'' or ``PATRIOT Act''--those didn't exist on September 10, 2001. They have all come since then as our Nation learns how to do more security, learns how to engage, and has learned a painful lesson that what people think in an isolated village in a remote country--what they think matters to us because what they may carry out, if left alone and ignored, could kill our family members and our fellow Americans.…”