Chuck Schumer Quotations

The Tea Party is a rear guard, not a vanguard.

What the public hates the most is when they think the politicians aren't listening to them. They understand that we can't solve all their problems with a snap of our fingers, but they sure want us to try because we are public servants.

You have to walk in the other guy's moccasins. You have to think what they think. If you want to bring somebody onto your side, you have to figure out what motivates them. What do they need?

The Internet in the 21st Century is as important to our future as highways were in the 20th Century. Like a highway, the Internet must remain free and open for all - not determined by the highest bidders.

On foreign policy, President Obama has kept our nation safe from terrorism and restored our standing in the world. When it comes to one of our closest allies - Israel - President Obama has been resolute.

Reclassification is the best way to for us to preserve the Internet as an unfettered tool for communication and the sharing of ideas.

Mr. Snowden is a coward who has chosen to run.

The vast majority of the people employed by Wall Street are the secretary who goes in to work on the Long Island Rail Road, who makes fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year.

Economic conservatives like immigration reform, and in fact, many of them supported the bill that John McCain and I put together in the Senate.

Have kids; have a lot of kids. Start early and keep having them.

Working with the media remains an effective and essential way to raise issues, educate the public, and prod policy-makers and corporate leaders to change for the better.

What we need to know are the kinds of things that are coming before the court now and it makes it hard to figure out what kind of justice you will be, particular because we have very little to go on,

There are some tax expenditures that are there for very obvious and very important and very good policy reasons. Whether it's the charitable deduction or the deduction for homes, it's not a loophole.

Yesterday the election was a shot across the bow to George Bush,

There are very close ties between the Jewish and Mormon people.

Mitt Romney would move the Court even further right, putting landmark decisions like Roe v. Wade at risk. Some say Romney would repeat the past. I disagree - he'd be worse.

Mitt Romney's only bottom line is the one at the end of his own bank statement. The problem is that he confuses his own narrow, self-interest - and that of people like him - with the national interest. He thinks as long as we do right by the Mitt Romneys of the world, America will be just fine.

My father, Abe, was a small businessman. For 32 years, he ran an exterminating company. That may explain why our family always associated the smell of roach spray with love.

If we do nothing and OPEC continues to constrict the supply of oil, the average American will pay $1,000 dollars more this year than ... last year out of their pockets,

I for one have woken up in the middle of the night thinking about it, wondering how I should vote, ... This is a vote over the chief justice of the Supreme Court ... this isn't just rolling the dice, it's betting the whole house.

Today, families like the one I grew up in still believe in that American dream. But as President Obama says, it's a make-or-break moment for the middle class. Mitt Romney's plans would make things worse.

I think it's a little insulting, a bit insulting to American workers when Rand Paul says that unemployment insurance is a disservice.

I think it makes a good deal of sense for us to take time, catch our breath, and take a few days out.

I take her at her word, but I certainly would like to know more about these phone conversations,

I think you've answered some questions, but not a whole lot of others,

little guy ... that he will be a lawyer's lawyer without an ideological agenda.

The 2014 election was not a repudiation of government in general.

Most of the people I meet who are on unemployment are people who have had jobs for 25 years, lost them; they've been knocking on doors every week.

Middle class people, I think they realize that Romney is not for them because of his narrowness, but they want to make sure that Barack Obama is focused on them with things that will make a difference. They know he tried, but they also know that it didn't do as well as they would have liked.

We don't expect it to go the whole way ... but it has to start on the path of going the whole way,

Voters did say 'repeal health care', they did say 'reduce the size of government.' But not a single one of them from the tea party or anywhere said 'give tax breaks to the wealthiest.'

You know, we have three branches of government. We have a House. We have a Senate. We have a President.

Well, the tough thing for them is that the Republican primary is pretty far over to the right, just as the Democratic primary is further over to the left than the average voter in each party.

We understand we have to plug new loopholes, but that doesn't mean we have to unplug the old ones.

Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession.

When Republicans say, 'The first thing you do when you do deficit reduction is reduce rates,' it would be like Democrats saying, 'The first thing you do when you do deficit reduction is provide free Medicare at age 55.' We'd like to do that! But it won't bring the deficit down. That's for sure.

To those who say ideology doesn't matter, they should take their argument to President Bush.

To those like Mitt Romney who want to take us backwards, let's send a strong message in November: as we say in Brooklyn, 'Fuhgeddaboutit.'

The president realizes that the views of the extreme right wing of his party are not the views of the American people, ... And for the second time in a row, he's sent us a nominee who we really don't know that much about.

The president ought to do his own internal investigation of the vice president's office, to see what happened, set some standards and if need be take the vice president to the woodshed,

To do health care was a noble, good thing, and it will help America dramatically. I don't begrudge Barack Obama choosing it, even though if I were president, I might not have.

We've had mistake after mistake after mistake, ... Face the Nation.

To introduce a whole new tax regime, that would be modern tax reform. But that's too big a task.

We certainly want those at the top to do well, but if you base your entire presidency and your entire economic platform on helping them do even better, you're missing what makes the economy tick. Because not everyone has been as fortunate as Mitt Romney, you cannot base your whole approach on a life experience as rarified as his.

You give the impression of being a meticulous legal navigator, but, in the end, you always seem to chart a rightward course.

You have to show Israel that it's not going to be forced to do things it doesn't want to do and can't do.

Big Oil behemoths are making out like bandits, while the average American family is getting killed by high gas prices, and soon-to-be-record heating oil prices.

Do they consider it the right thing to do to reach out to the middle, or do they sort of batten down the hatches and firm up the hard base on the other side?

Every administration has this idea to talk tough to Israel and make nice to the Arabs and the Palestinians, and that's the way to bring about peace. It's counter-productive - it's actually the opposite.

There will certainly be more concern and scrutiny for Sandra Day O'Connor's seat,

The Tea Party people are ideologues. They are right, and no one can change their minds. There is no reason for compromise.

The Tea Party elites gained extraordinary influence by being able to funnel millions of undisclosed dollars into campaigns with ads that distort the truth and attack government.

The Tea Party elites believe government is evil. Everything about government is bad, and they blame all problems, even non-economic problems, problems that were caused by the private sector, on government.

office buildings are our factories. They are at the center of economic growth and job creation.

administration's lack of action today hurts all Americans by refusing to acknowledge the obvious - that China manipulates its currency.

Any party that writes off 25, 30, 35 percent of the American people is not going to be a winner.

The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.

You may very well possess the most powerful intellect of any person to come before the Senate for this position, ... tour de force.

This is not a game of 'gotcha.' This is a game to figure out how somebody thinks and what their judicial philosophy is and what their method legal reasoning is, ... He doesn't have to answer every one of those questions to get an idea. But I don't think it would be very helpful if he said, 'I can't answer any of them.'

The way to lessen the grip of the Tea Party on the electoral process would be to do what a handful have done and have a primary where all voters, members of every party, can vote, and the top two vote-getters then enter a runoff.

This administration made mistakes, the previous administration made mistakes. But the inability of this administration and of the national security adviser to admit that mistakes were made makes us fear that we will make future mistakes.

They have convinced us that the likelihood of real progress ... is very real.

This portends really well for the future, ... Unless George Bush reverses his polices and reaches to the middle you're going to see many more victories like this.

It is sad that the president felt he had to pick a nominee likely to divide Americans instead of choosing a nominee in the mold of Sandra Day O'Connor, who would unify us,

It's no secret that the manufacturing industry has been getting killed.

Its become perfectly clear that the big oil companies are cashing in while average American families are being bled dry,

Everyone has a hole inside themselves. They don't know they had it until they have kids, and then that hole fills up. And it's so great; it's just God's greatest gift to us.

The administration's lack of action today hurts all Americans by refusing to acknowledge the obvious - that China manipulates its currency.

Okay, known to vote for Republicans, ... compounding the crime, so to speak, because they were political and now they're trying in an 'Alice in Wonderland' way to accuse the ambassador and his wife of being political.

Skyrocketing gas prices have tipped consumers upside down this summer and to protect our economy, the President should act immediately to tap the SPR.

The federal government has a responsibility to make sure that these companies continue to innovate instead of just profiting from the status quo.

I know that a location has already been chosen for every Super Bowl until 2007, but New York has suffered the devastating economic impact of September 11, both on behalf of the entire nation and worse than any other city in the nation.

if need be, take the vice president to the wood shed.

If he is a Rehnquist, that would not be a cause for exultation in my book, but it would not be a cause for alarm. The court's balance will not be altered. But there is a reasonable danger that he will be like Justice Thomas, the most radical justice on the Supreme Court. It is not that I am certain that he will be a Thomas, it's not even that it's more than 50 percent, but the risk that he might be a Thomas and the lack of any reassurance that he won't, particularly in light of this president's professed desire to nominate people in that mold, is just not good enough. I hope he will not be a Justice Thomas but the risk is too great to bear.

If ever there was a time that cried out for consensus, the time is now.

I appreciate attempts by Secretary (Bill) Richardson to cajole OPEC into increasing production, but it hasn't worked and it's time for the United States to play a little hardball.

How was it we were so far behind the curve that it was almost laughable. It just makes my jaw drop to think that on 9/11 or 9/10 the kind of technology that is available to most school kids and certainly every small business in this country, why isn't it available to the FBI?

You couldn't ask for somebody to do more in Washington than the mayor does . . . I think the mayor has done a good job. I make no bones about that.

You've devoted your entire life to the law and it's clear that you love it,

The dome of the U.S. Capitol has fallen into severe disrepair... As the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which oversees matters of the Capitol's physical plant, I have serious concerns about the consequences of omitting this funding from the stopgap spending measure.

The door outside this room doesn't say, check your views out the door. So your failure to answer questions is confounding me. You've done it in instance, after instance, after instance, after instance.

The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite - plutocrats like the Koch Brothers -want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants.

The Chinese manipulate their currency and the administration should not have ducked the issue,