Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we find ourselves at an interesting point. Let me start by saying what a tremendous privilege it is to serve in this body. Every single day that I come to the building from where I live, I express that to myself--what a tremendous privilege it is for all of us to serve in this body, denoted by many as the greatest deliberative body in the world. Certainly, we find ourselves here in a place where we can effect so many things that not only affect our citizens but citizens across the world. What a privilege that is. The Presiding Officer and I have had numerous conversations in the past. I spent a life in business before coming to the Senate, and I know the Presiding Officer did a lot of unique things as well. At the age of 25, I was fortunate enough to build a business, starting with a small amount of money. It ended up operating all around the country. One of the things we did after every project--I built shopping centers around the country--is that we would get together and analyze the things we had done well and the things we had done not so well in an effort to become better. At the end of each year, we would sit down and look at our company, which was growing very rapidly, and try to analyze those things. Sometimes we would have setbacks, but generally speaking, the company continued to operate on an upward trend. What I find here is just the opposite. I have been here now a decade, and what we do is just the opposite of that.…”