Top 28 Quotes & Sayings by Angus King

My desire is to be as independent as I can be, as long as I can be, subject to being effective.

I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.

It's hard running as an independent. I wouldn't have won the Senate election if I hadn't been governor. I had credibility. The hard part is getting voters to the point where they think it's thinkable and not a waste of time.

Somebody said, 'You may be a committee chair.' I don't think so. I don't think anybody would want me that much.

I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon. They called it the imperial presidency when he was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated.

How can you work with someone if you went into their state to campaign against them?

I had no intention of getting back into politics. I was teaching at Bowdoin and happily retired from politics.

One of my life principles is that if something isn't working, doing something harder isn't necessarily going to produce the same result.

If it's necessary to join a caucus and get a committee assignment, I'll do it.

I think that people have to reward those individuals who are prepared to work across the political aisle. I don't see any other way; if you don't talk to people with whom you disagree, you're never going to solve problems.

My view of the filibuster is either you've got to lower vote edge or make people really filibuster if they feel that seriously about a piece of legislation.

I have a Twitter account; I have a fantastic Facebook page.

I've come to realize that an unencumbered U.S. senator is a profound threat to the whole system. It's somebody that they can't put in a box and say, 'Oh, well, we know how this guy is going to vote.'

What do we do if we pass a law that says this has to be done, and then China says, oh, well, OK, we're going to pass that law too and we want access to every iPhone in China? Iran says the same thing, Russia says the same thing - you know, the bad guys go underground. They'll shift to some other encrypted platform.

We are at this moment where what concerns me is that we're all so caught up in Donald Trump, James Comey, and David Kushner, and Mike Flynn, that it's in danger of overwhelming the real story, which is what the Russians did and tried to do. I contend that it was the most serious attack on our country since September 11, 2001. It was deliberate, it was sophisticated, it was conscious, and it was in some ways successful.

The intelligence community, in particular the FBI, have been sounding alarms about this for more than a year. So to argue that suddenly we have to do this because of the San Bernardino case doesn't really pass the straight-face test. I mean, they've been talking about this. And to say, well, it will only apply to this case, that just - that doesn't wash. This is a major piece of public policy.

Well, first let's say that the fundamental responsibility of any government is national security - in the preamble to the Constitution, provide for the common defense and insure domestic tranquility.

The idea of some contact of Donald Trump's office with the Russians to try to find areas of common ground is not irrational or unusual. The question is: Were you doing it in an appropriate way and through proper channels?

I would say it would be worth it if, in fact, it would - if you could demonstrate that that would be the case and that the results and ramifications around the world wouldn't lead to more problems and more people dying. It's a very complex issue, and that's why I think we need to decide it.

I think it's important to also realize that this isn't a case of Apple being asked to simply flip a switch or, you know, plug in a wire from one place to another. They're being asked to write new software that doesn't exist. They purposefully did not create this kind of backdoor.

James Comey had nine interactions with Bob Mueller after the Donald Trump's election. And in none of those, Comey testified, did he express any interest, concern, about what the Russians did, how they did it, how do we prevent it. He continuously has in fact denigrated the whole idea and dismissed that it was the Russians, and apparently hasn't yet accepted the 100-percent consensus of everybody that knows about this that this was a conscious and deliberate effort on their part to attack our democracy.

I don't think the special counsel can avoid that question based upon the president's Donald Trump own statements. But I'm not charging obstruction of justice.

I'm too fiscally conservative for the Democrats and too socially liberal for the Republicans, like 75% of the American people.

There's a host of difficult issues here, and that's why when you mentioned at the top of the show that the committees were looking at this, that's where I think we should be going.

The only, the only possibility would be if the Republicans are in the majority and they can offer me something that would be especially advantageous to Maine. Somebody said, 'You may be a committee chair.' I don't think so. I don't think anybody would want me that much.

That's because of everything the public interest and the media interest is focused on: What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it? Whether there was cooperation with the Russians. I don't mean to say that's a distraction or we shouldn't follow it up. But the underlying story of the Russians trying to subvert our democracy, both through propaganda, planted stories, manipulation of social media and through direct efforts to infiltrate our state election system, is really an enormously significant event. And it's not over.

I haven't seen - I haven't heard the arguments that would make that case. And I haven't seen a proposal yet that satisfies the objections. The problem is, you create a key like this, and it can't - it's hard to say that it's going to be hidden. And then it becomes used both by our government in multiple cases, but also it could get out as far as hackers are concerned or other countries.

Every day in America, about 25,000 people buy a quarter-inch drill. But nobody in America wants a quarter-inch drill. What they want are holes.