Senate Quotes

“When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“If you're ever feeling a lack of middle-aged white men, just pop into the Capitol. Not so much the House of Representatives, which has a bit more color and texture, but the Senate -- jeez. Yes, let's have more testosterone running the country.

Maximum Ride, School's Out--Forever”
― James Patterson

“I want to say that further you are not a great chief of this country. That you have no following, no power, no control." Logan continued, "You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America or its committees ...the government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.
-Senator John Logan, 1883”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“Thank God she doesn't have to be confirmed by the Senate.

(on the birth of his granddaughter)”
― Herbert Hoover

“Do you pray for the senators, Dr. Hale?' someone asked the chaplain. No, I look at the senators and I pray for the country.”
― Edward Everett Hale

“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”
― Frank Church

“Justice Denied

Thousands of women, probably more

I cannot reach them behind justice doors

Many stay silent, barred just like me.

Haunted by demons, faces unseen.

Still by the hundreds, they continue to serve

Duty and country, active and reserve.

Thankless, forgotten through America's wars

Scarred like their brethren, treated as foes.

Volunteered to go to the shores.

Died like the others, shamed to the core.

Where is the dignity, long since denied?

Lost in the White House of Justice Denied

Women in service since beginning of time

Often they're treated like victims in crime.

Where is their voice, silence throughout the years?

It's dead in the Senate and House, with their tears!”
― Diane Chamberlain, Conduct Unbecoming: Rape, Torture, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Military Commanders

“In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).”
― Orit Badouk Epstein, Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs

“Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful.”
― Sarah Palin

“A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
― Alexander Hamilton, The Complete Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers

“The Democratic party in Louisiana just continued to move father and farther away from basic American values and farther away from the voters of Louisiana. And much farther away from me. So I just couldn’t take it anymore. And recently, there was some comments made in the Senate, the comments were that if anyone opposes what we frequently call Obamacare, if anyone opposes it, they do so only because the President is an African-American, and therefore, that position is racist. My mother, who’s 103 years old, called me on the telephone when she heard that. She said ‘Boy, I don’t want you to be involved in anything like that. I hope you disassociated yourself from that’ and I was on the verge of doing it anyway, and that was just the last straw,”
― Elbert Guillory

“The determined attempt to discredit Robert Mueller, the FBI and the Justice Department is an endeavor to protect the fervent saber rattlers themselves. You see, all this commotion kicked into overdrive once the Special Counsel sought information from Deutsche Bank.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“Shouldn't it be made a crime to vie for a position you can't deliver? We have a confused and compromised executive and an assembly of pigs providing checks and balances in Kenya.”
― DON SANTO

“Politics is not just about power and money games, politics can be about the improvement of people's lives, about lessening human suffering in our world and bringing about more peace and more justice. -Paul Wellstone (Minnesota Senator, Al Franken predecessor)”
― Al Franken, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

“Paul's greatest contribution to the progressive cause wasn't what he accomplished in the senate, although he accomplished a lot. It's the way he inspired others to take action, and taught them to be effective, and gave them the confidence to stand up and shout about what they believed it.”
― Al Franken, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

“I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges.

I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.”
― Margaret Chase Smith

“The Imperial Senate, ever conscious of the weight of public opinion resting on the tip of the pencil come voting day, wanted to be fair and just – or at least appear that way. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there was little love lost between Imperial troops and the locals who viewed each other with little short of open hostility, and often through the sighting devices attached to weaponry of various diverse descriptions.”
― Christina Engela, Dead Beckoning

“Most of Senators loves their job, with all the perks and influence it carried, but doesn’t hesitate about complaining how dreadful living in Washington is. Awful town, keeping them away from their wonderful states, even though many couldn’t be seen in their home states except for campaigning periods.”
― Krzysztof Pacyński, A perfect Patricide: Part 1

“As they entered, Lemuel Sixpack was in the middle of his trademark long- winded oration. His last name was really Sixpack and, as a proverbial icing on the cake, he represented the Prohibition Party.”
― Krzysztof Pacyński, A perfect Patricide: Part 1

“I've said it before, Donald John Trump is the mythological trickster demon we know. That sly fox upon that rock. Michael Richard Pence, however, is the DEVIL.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“As soon as the positions of the senate became patrimonial they no longer served their purpose of serving the public interest. The existence of the patricians is an insult to the plebeians.”
― Et Imperatrix Noctem

“Mr. President, I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear. It is a condition that comes from the lack of effective leadership either in the legislative branch or the executive branch of our government.”
― Margaret Chase Smith

“The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the world. But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.

It is ironical that we senators can in debate in the Senate, directly or indirectly, by any form of words, impute to any American who is not a senator any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming an American--and without that non-senator American having any legal redress against us--yet if we say the same thing in the Senate about our colleagues we can be stopped on the grounds of being out of order.

It is strange that we can verbally attack anyone else without restraint and with full protection, and yet we hold ourselves above the same type of criticism here on the Senate floor.”
― Margaret Chase Smith

“As a Republican, I say to my colleagues on this side of the aisle that the Republican party faces a challenge today that is not unlike the challenge which it faced back in Lincoln's day. The Republican party so successfully met that challenge that it emerged from the Civil War as the champion of a united nation-in addition to being a party which unrelentingly fought loose spending and loose programs.

Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of "know nothing, suspect everything" attitudes.”
― Margaret Chase Smith

“My sin was to raise an objection to one state during the electoral college certification process, thereby triggering a congressional debate, precisely as permitted by the law and precisely as Democratic members of Congress have done in the electoral counts of 2001, 2005, and 2017. I was, in fact, waiting to participate in that debate on the Senate floor when the riot halted our work and forced the Senate (temporarily) to disband. For this I was branded a “seditionist” and worse. But like many others attacked by the corporations and the Left, my real crime was to have challenged the reign of the woke capitalists.”
― Josh Hawley

“He thanked me for “engaging so thoroughly in the process.” I wondered if that was Senate code for being a pain in the neck, but I thought it better if I didn’t ask.”
― Elizabeth Warren, This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class

“Ideology is no excuse for not focusing on working for and with the people who pay you to represent them, despite their politics — people who you are supposed to be fighting for.”
― Tyrus, Just Tyrus

“About all I can say about the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.”
― Will Rogers

“Any democratically elected government that listens more to its campaign financiers than its citizens, takes the demands of financial lenders sine qua non and those of its impoverished citizenry non exitus, is a failed government, corrupt and incompetent. It's not a government for the people and by the people, it is a government by the Whores for power!”
― Njau Kihia

“Political historian Barouth Regorab had likened the difference between a planetary government and the Galactic Senate to that between a rural community and a metropolis: “When a person depends upon their neighbor for assistance during the harvest—when strangers are few and familial ties bind the farmer to the freighter captain—the greatest danger is shunning or exile. Mollifying your peers becomes a matter of survival. You have an incentive to iron out differences, or if necessary to bury any radical beliefs that would put you at odds with your community.
“In a city of millions, however, a person may build a tailor-made community inside the larger organism. Anger your neighbor and you may move in with a friend. Become an outcast among your co-workers and you may take a job with a competitor. Diverse arts and philosophies may flourish without the flattening effect of more tight-knit communities, and differences may be celebrated. Yet a lack of common ties can also cause neighbors to see one another as rivals. Ideological opponents can be dismissed without need for engagement. And good people may slip through the cracks, lost in the chaos and written off as someone else’s problem.”
― Alexander Freed