Political Quotes

“Thank you. For many of my colleagues this is just another earmark. For me this is somewhat personal because the first job that I ever held right out of high school before I went to college was in a textile plant. That was when they were plentiful in North Carolina and really across the Southeast. Hard work, in a lot of cases it was dirty work, but it was honorable work, and it made a difference in people's lives. The National Textile Center, or NTC, as you have already heard, really is a national initiative. It's not a localized project. It's a project that has already made a difference. It will continue to make a difference. And as you have heard, it's a consortium of eight leading textile research universities. One of those is in my State. Actually one of the universities happens to be in my district, an outstanding university, North Carolina State University. But each of these States making a contribution, or the universities in these States. They're working to advance every aspect of the textile industry, from fiber production to marketing, through research, education, and, more importantly, industrial partnerships. That's the kind of thing we ought to be promoting here. We ought to be about getting people to work together. That's what this is about. Yet we have an amendment that says, no, we don't want you to work together. We'd just as soon you have those silos. We argue on this floor daily about knocking down silos and getting people to work together.”