Political Quotes

“Madam President, I commend and salute the work of Senator Manchin, the senior Senator from West Virginia, for his work on behalf of American workers generally, but, in particular, his passionate advocacy and his hard work to make sure that we, in this body, the United States Senate, that we do everything we can to keep our promise. I pick up from where he left off. As he has so often said when he came to this floor, as he did today, to talk about the people whose retirement security is on the line, this debate applies to a whole range of workers, but when you consider just coal miners and their families, who have given the country so much, I am reminded of a story from my home area, northeastern Pennsylvania. We produce, in a few counties in northeastern Pennsylvania, the hard coal, anthracite coal. The great novel of Stephen Crane came to that region in the 1890s. He would go on to become famous for writing the novel, ``The Red Badge of Courage.'' But Stephen Crane, when he was a young man--and he never made it to his 30th birthday, so he was an accomplished writer even as a young man--he wrote an essay about a coal mine in Scranton, my hometown in Lackawanna County. In that essay, he described going into a coal mine and what he saw. At one point in the essay, he said that the mine was a place of inscrutable darkness, a soundless place of tangible loneliness.…”