When BP was not moving fast enough on claims, we told BP to set aside $20 billion in a fund - managed by an independent third party - to help all those whose lives have been turned upside down by the spill.
I started as a community organizer. Every one of my campaigns was premised on getting new people involved. And if there's a theme in my public career it's that if ordinary people get involved then good things happen. So I want to see the Democratic Party move in that direction. And what that means is that we aren't just micro-targeting to eke out presidential victories; it means that we're showing up in places where right now we're not winning a lot.
What is also true is that partly because my docket was really full here, so I couldn't be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.
I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.
No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.
In every attempt there will be one set of men who will applaud, and another who will pick holes. Go on doing your own work, what need have you to reply to any party?
I just consider myself a piece of the puzzle and I'm lucky enough to be asked or invited to the party, if you will. I hope I can bring some laughs and grimaces to the fans.
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.
I just consider myself a piece of the puzzle and I'm lucky enough to be asked or invited to the party, if you will. I hope I can bring some laughs and grimaces to the fans.
The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace...but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power.
Tonight Illinois has set a tone for the nation, that we won't stand idle hoping that our economy improves. This is a brand new day for the Illinois Republican Party.
When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.
I just consider myself a piece of the puzzle and I'm lucky enough to be asked or invited to the party, if you will. I hope I can bring some laughs and grimaces to the fans.