Top 87 Quotes & Sayings by Chuck Schumer

As long as the Palestinians send terrorists onto school buses and to nightclubs to blow up people, Israel has no choice but to build the fence.

I made education the highest priority of my campaign - actually education and jobs - and the reason is a simple one: I think the future of America depends on it.

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.

In a brave new world, a post-September 11 world, anyone is going to make certain mistakes. The mistakes that have been made on homeland security, on protecting our Nation from another terrorist attack, are mistakes of omission. We are simply not doing enough.

I went to the public schools myself. And they were great for me.

In today's competitive economy, to stand still is to die.

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.

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.

Arafat was a barrier to peace.

Soft money will find its way and seep into the political system and corrode it, unless we plug every hole.

America is a place where we all come together. It is a place of consensus.

I think teaching should be an exalted profession, not a picked-on profession.

It is essential that all Americans take the time to honor and remember those individuals who gave their lives in defense of our liberty.

But these days there are a lot of younger people who would like to go into teaching but don't because the economic opportunities are sometimes elsewhere.

You can set up whatever negotiations or structure you want, but until the Palestinians are willing to accept the fact, as the majority of Israelis do, that there should be two states between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, we won't have peace.

If we say the Geneva Convention is obsolete, then what do others who have our soldiers say?

When one has success, the answer is not to undo that success. It is to continue what has been done.

I believe the war on terror is the vital discussion of this decade and of our generation, probably. To win the war on terror, you need a good offense and a good defense. On defense, I regret to say, basically, this administration has not come close to doing what is necessary.

Let me say this, to all of the chattering class that so much focuses on those little tiny, yes, porky amendments - the American people really don't care.

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

Inaction is perhaps the greatest mistake of all.

I told the President, I told Rahm Emanuel and others in the administration that I thought the policy they took to try to bring about negotiations is counter-productive, because when you give the Palestinians hope that the United States will do its negotiating for them, they are not going to sit down and talk.

Anyone who thinks they have a monopoly on truth, and there is only one way to see the world, always gets us into trouble.

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.

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

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.

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.

When someone takes a private photo, on a private cell phone, it should remain just that: private.

Democrats don't relate to middle-class people.

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.'

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.'

I'm strongly for a patient Bill of Rights. Decisions ought to be made by doctors, not accountants.

Whether you are a Democrat or Republican, whether you are a liberal or a conservative, we know that neither this President nor prior Presidents of both parties did everything right or we would not have had a 9/11.

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

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.

I'd like to see the health care professionals making decisions, not some bureaucrat in Indianapolis working for an insurance company.

Do not let arguments of expediency persuade you. That is the slow road to oblivion. That is the tortured path to undoing step by step, bit by bit, as the river creates a canyon, the way of life that we love.

I respect people who feel things passionately. I do. But when someone is a judge, that is not what they should bring to the bench. It is not really passion, except in rare instances, that serves the bench well. It is, rather, an ability to understand the law and follow it.

You do have to change things as warfare changes.

Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that's not what any of us should want from our judges.

I'm totally opposed to vouchers. I will fight them tooth and nail.

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.

So I want my kids to go to public schools because I think it's a better education overall.

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

Giving up even an ounce of precious freedom is a very serious thing to do.

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.

But I don't think the Democratic Party is at eye level with the middle class.

A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure.

We tend to talk, Democrats, as a party, in legislative terms.

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

We need to make sure middle-class people are able to pay the bills. We need to make sure that poor people don't starve. Those are values, too.

If we are going to stay a great power and I hope and pray we will we need the truth. We need to know what is going right and we need to know what is going wrong. There is no greater time than now.

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.

When Mitt Romney says he wants to reform the tax code, hold on to your wallets. We know Mitt Romney never met a tax haven he didn't like. But his new favorite tax haven is actually not the Cayman Islands - its Paul Ryan's budget.

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.

There are two tests in life, more important than any other test. On Monday morning, when you wake up, do you feel in the pit of your stomach you can't wait to go to work? And when you're ready to go home Friday afternoon, do you say, 'I can't wait to go home?'

Barack Obama knows that to create an economy built to last, we need to focus on middle-class families. Families who stay up on Sunday nights pacing the floor, like my dad did, while their children, tucked in bed, dream big dreams. Families who aren't sure what Monday morning will bring, but who believe our nation's best days are still ahead.

I want to attract the best people into teaching.

We are on the precipice of a crisis, a Constitutional crisis. The checks and balances, which have been at the core of this Republic, are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances that say if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing, it's almost a temper tantrum.

Well, I think it's too early to call Fallujah a failure.