Political Quotes

“I rise to join my colleagues from Kansas, and Senator Warner, I believe, will be here in a few minutes to support the resolution described by Senator Moran. This is personal to me in two ways. Obviously, as the Senator from Virginia, many of the victims on the American Airlines flight and two of the three soldiers who were killed in the military helicopter flight deployed from Fort Belvoir in Virginia were Virginians, and so our community has been very touched by this. I was at a vigil on the riverbank in Alexandria last night with members of the community, the first responder community, local officials, and others who feel this wound very deeply. And so that is the first personal connection that I have to this tragic event. But I also rise as a kid who grew up in Kansas. And my mother grew up in a town--actually, went to the same high school as Senator Marshall. It is not far from Wichita, the airport from which the flight departed. So as I read the stories of the 67 who died, the Virginians and the Kansans, they were stories that seemed very familiar to me. It is hard to find words to sum up the many feelings that I have and that others have, and I said last night at the vigil that I attended that when words fail and you can't find the words, usually there are words of ancient wisdom that do the trick, and I used a phrase from Psalms 90 that I love: Teach us how short our lives are so that we may become wise.…”