Mark Shields
There is always strength in numbers. The more individuals or organizations that you can rally to your cause, the better.Collection: Strength
I think any advocate who is effective has fully acquainted himself or herself with the legislator they are going to meet. Know what committees they are on, what issues they are interested in, all in an effort to build a bridge for communicating with them.
The important thing to understand about legislators is that there are dozens of competing interests and issues that occupy them. They are stretched thin.
In the 2004 presidential election, we saw a wonderful example of citizens making contributions. In fact, individual giving to both the Kerry and Bush campaigns was the highest in our nation's history.
When the size of the group supporting your cause reaches a critical mass, any legislator or elected official has to pay attention.
The advantage that hospitals have over other institutions is that hospitals are community-based. You can't outsource your work; you can't move your emergency department to Pakistan.
The problem with smear campaigns is that too often they work.
Everybody who served in John Kerry's boat under his command, save one, has stood with him.
You've got people who didn't serve with John Kerry saying they did serve with John Kerry in the boat. With George Bush, we can't find anybody who did serve with him.
John Kerry's biography was central to his campaign.
What you have is two men seeking the White House; they're both products of prominent New England families. They both went to private boarding schools. They both went to a prestigious university.
As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve.
John McCain was victimized in the South Carolina primary.
Character is destiny and character is important to American campaigns.
George Bush is trying to play it both ways.
When you run for president of the United States, everybody does the same thing in the campaign-they talk about veterans, how much they admire them, how grateful they are.
George Bush says what John Kerry did was noble. Yet he sees him being savaged by his own supporters.
John McCain has become the de facto running mate of George W. Bush.
You can't have someone with a pinkie out there at the U.N. or any other place.
If I were John Bolton, I'd take great consolation in the words of my principal supporter on the committee, who gave a ringing endorsement, which was, There is no evidence that he has broken any laws.
Let's not pretend that all of a sudden, this is some new system.
There's no question that Stalin broke the agreements made at Yalta completely about elections that were supposed to be held immediately in Poland, and Eastern Europe was plunged into slavery as a consequence.
I didn't realize the president was such an historian.
Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.
Since the election, since the formation of a government, the death in Iraq has increased. The United States stands by, helpless to do anything about it. That's the reality, not George Bush's revisionist history!
George Washington was the president who could never tell a lie, and Richard Nixon was the president who could never tell the truth. Donald Trump is truly the president who can't tell the difference.Collection: Lying
Drones are sort of the perfect weapon for a country that doesn't want to go to war. It only - there's no fingerprint. There's no direct involvement. There's human beings killed on the other end. You never see them. You don't have to worry about them. You don't have to meet their widows. It's sort of an antiseptic warfare.Collection: Country
I thought Mike Pence, upon reflection to me, came across a little bit like your favorite aunt who refuses, in spite of first-person evidence that grandpa has been drunk and disorderly in public, that, says, no, no, grandpa would never do that, even though grandpa is being taken off in handcuffs.Collection: Taken
This is America, where a white Catholic male Republican judge was murdered on his way to greet a Democratic Jewish woman member of Congress, who was his friend. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year old Mexican-American gay college student, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon, all eulogized by our African American President.Collection: Gay
When you have got military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, they're intended for one purpose. And that is to inflict as much damage on human beings in as short as time as possible.Collection: Military
I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump was born without the embarrassment gene or the moral reservation gene.Collection: Thinking
The measure of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether, as Franklin Roosevelt said, we provide enough for those who have too little.Collection: Progress
The organizing principle of the United States defensive foreign policy had been opposition to the Soviet Union. There is no more Soviet Union.Collection: Principles
There's nothing wrong with being organized.Things that change history tend to be organized.Collection: Organized
Gone is any mention of American exceptionalism. I happen to believe that twice, three times in the 20th century, the United States saved Western democracy, both World War - both World Wars and the Cold War.Collection: War
There is nothing more basic to our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.Collection: Leader
The economy of the United States gross domestic product doubled from 1996 to 2015, doubled, more than, $8.8 trillion to $17.1 trillion. And the median household income went down.Collection: United States
You have to understand that Republicans are on lockstep on one issue. They will not raise taxes. Democrats are in lockstep on another issue, pro-choice in all cases on abortion.Collection: Issues
We had the clip of [Donald] Trump saying: I'm not president of the globe. I'm president of the United States.[Ronald] Reagan would have never said that. [Dwight] Eisenhower would have never said that, because he would have said, yes, I'm president of the United States, but it's in our interests to be securing a world order.Collection: Order
White working-class voters or working-class voters have felt abandoned, have felt, in many senses, disparaged by the political leadership of America.Collection: Class
Everybody who served in John Kerry's boat under his command save one has stood with him.Collection: Sea
I believe devoutly that the national election is the closest thing we have to a civic sacrament of democracy. And I really do think that heed must be paid, and when people make a decision, those who are on the other side, including me, accept it, for that reason.Collection: Believe
I do think that Republicans are flirting with their tax cut, which has always been the narcotic of Republicans, that they in fact have to at some point, with any remote pretense of candor, abandon any pretense of a balanced budget.I mean, they talk about - because they are going to finance the tax cut by tax cuts. That's how they're going to do it. And I do think that the will is there right now in the Congress to act. I think they will be as close to unity as you will see on Capitol Hill this year.Collection: Mean
The stated objective and the mission of Vladimir Putin's Russia is to destabilize the North Atlantic Alliance.Collection: Russia
The White House, as Warren Harding said, and I think accurately, is an alchemist. We find out the strengths, the weaknesses and the smarts and the dumbs of whoever those occupants are under the pressure of the presidency.Collection: Smart
Dan Coats, retiring senator from Indiana, a mild-mannered man, a former United States ambassador to Germany, former congressman, said of Ted Cruz he's the most self-centered, narcissistic, pathological liar I have ever seen.And he said, you can quote me on that.Collection: Liars
I have my disagreements with President Obama, but President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him. He's chosen people who have been pretty scandal-free.Collection: Running
I do think what the Tea Party also had was Obamacare and the unpopularity of that, at least at the time. And so whether there is something that is equally unpopular and equally galvanizing that is almost self-destructive from the administration, that's another factor that we will wait and see.Collection: Party
The final thing the Tea Party had was, they fed into the philosophy that Donald Trump now embodies. So they had a different view of how the world should be governed. And so they had a lot of things that we didn't appreciate going for them as time went by.Collection: Philosophy
It's tempting to remember that the Tea Party had a peak and then the Republican Party establishment sort of beat it back down. And so these things are won in a day.Collection: Party