Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by Sheldon Whitehouse - Page 2

We would like the rest of the world to look up to American democracy. So when there is this kind of folly taking place, it makes it difficult for other rational nations to look up to American democracy.

You can measure the warming oceans with a thermometer. You measure sea level rise with a yardstick. You can measure the dramatic increase in acidification with a simple pH test, and you can replicate what excess CO2 does to seawater in a basic high school science lab.

The bottom line is this: A private company and/or its industry allies should not knowingly lie to the American people about the harms that are caused by its product.

The Heartland Institute is about as biased as they come, and it's funded by the likes of Exxon and the Koch brothers. This is the same group that took out billboard space to compare people who understand climate change to the Unabomber.

Every week in the Senate, I give a speech telling my colleagues it is time to wake up to the reality of a changing climate.

Every one of us deserves a voice that our president will hear.

If Republicans start losing their seats because they're climate deniers, that is a very salutary signal.

Climate change may not be the most important issue to every American, but strong majorities do consider it a major problem, and they aren't likely to take seriously a candidate who denies the science and who is plainly in the pocket of the polluters.

Frankly, we should have an ARPA-O, an Advanced Research Projects Agency for oceans research, to match DARPA for defense and ARPA-E for energy. And we should have an Oceans and Coasts Fund to match the upland- and freshwater-directed Land and Water Conservation Fund.

I suspect that a lot of the frustration people feel about government would feel a lot better if we had corporate influence out of our politics and were running a democracy like the founding fathers intended.

I think a lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump were frustrated. And what they thought was, OK, government is broken. Therefore, we're going to send in this incendiary character. And he's just going to going to bust it all up, and we'll see what happens.

Millions upon millions of secret spending by the fossil fuel industry that was unleashed by the disastrous 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision - this money not only fuels the campaigns of many candidates; it also represents a threat to those who don't toe the polluter line on climate change.

Our American history reflects a long-standing tension between people and power. In fact, all government everywhere does. But our American form of government solved the problem, better than most, of moderating this tension between people and power.

We've seen too often what happens when wealthy and powerful industries gain excessive influence over the agencies that regulate them. The capture of the Minerals Management Service at the Department of Interior contributed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The fossil fuel industry has taken control of, and powered up, architecture and methods originally built by the tobacco industry and others to attack and deny science.

Putting a price on carbon pollution is one of the best things we can do to stem the tide of climate change.

The Constitution provided no protection against corporations; the Constitution has a blind spot for them.

Muzzling our leading scientists benefits no one.

Legislation to level the playing field for working families is dead on arrival in the Citizens United Congress.

To be clear, I don't know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don't have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it's all smoke and no fire. But there's an awful lot of smoke.

Each generation in this country gets the responsibility of being the ambassadors for this American democracy that our parents and grandparents fought, bled, and died for.

Society is indeed better off when we share knowledge with one another and have open debates about the issues in the public arena, with the hands and motives of the players identified.

If Republicans want to defend the rights of corporations and billionaires to spend unlimited, secret money in campaigns, then they should say so.

Fraud investigations punish those who lie, knowing that they are lying, intending to fool others, and do it for money. No one should be too big to answer for that conduct.

Citizens United is a disgrace of a decision, holding that corporate money is corporate speech and entitled to the same First Amendment protection as human speech. As a result, corporations now can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our elections - often in secret, without any public disclosure.

We are Christian and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and none of the above. We are gay and straight. We are black, brown, white, and innumerable combinations. We are young and old, female and male, with and without disabilities, urban and rural, and liberal and conservative. Every one of us is an equal American.

The big polluters are confident in their grip on Congress. They have basically achieved control of the Republican Party, and as a result, they are basically able to block action in Congress that the public needs and the country deserves.

Republicans aren't cowards. Many will take the side of climate principle in a fair fight. But it is asking a lot of them to take a principled stand on climate when they don't see one corporate friend ready to help them.

The dirty secret is that climate change is not really a partisan issue in Congress.

In many ways, the rotten effects of dark money are seen less in what we do than in what we don't do.

Not only will a carbon fee reduce carbon emissions, it will force big polluters to pay for the damage their pollution does to public health and the environment, generating billions in new revenue for the American people.

The worst blows to humanity from carbon pollution may come at us from the oceans.

In the Internet economy, information is everything: The more a company knows about a consumer, the more carefully it can tailor its advertising to that customer, and the more revenue it can generate in return.

If you look at the casualties, the federal government isn't waging a War on Coal. If anything, coal is waging a war on us.

The American Republican Party is the last political bastion of the fossil fuel industry - now so in tow to the fossil fuel industry that it cannot face up to the realities of carbon pollution and climate change.

The dreadful decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission was the culmination of the Republican appointees' careful work to open American politics to corporate influence.

My thesis is that government is not, in fact, broken. It's just listening to the wrong people, and it's listening to all of this quiet influence. So it's a very robust operation that operates kind of under the surface.

Senators who once supported common-sense legislation have gone silent as stones under the threat of the polluters' spending.

The fossil fuel industry maintains a science denial operation and a political influence operation designed to do just that. What's good for their business is more important to them than what's good for America.

Getting past the influence of the fossil fuel industry will take courage, especially on the part of the Republican majority whom they so relentlessly bully and cajole. But we must do it.

Regulators owned and controlled by industry are not the American way.

From lying about climate change, to undermining programs that make up our social safety net, to opposing laws that reduce gun violence, to fighting marriage equality, the Kochs' tentacles infiltrate all parts of America's public debates.

Juries are the constitutional institution designed to protect ordinary citizens against the wealthy and powerful.

I believe that the role of president of the United States is vastly different from the role of candidate and that the Donald Trump of the campaign will not succeed as president.

Consumers recognize, and don't like, corporate lying.

The 'Wall Street Journal' is quite irate that I rank them with industry front groups and cranks denying climate change. But they have a record whenever industrial pollutants are involved. Look at the 'Journal''s commentary on acid rain, on the ozone layer, and on climate change.

As a Senator from Rhode Island, I wish that once - just once - the fossil fuel industry and their paid-for PR machine would concede that burning their product causes real harm to other people.

I, for one - despite being a pretty solid climate hawk, I am extremely sympathetic to West Virginia and its coal-country needs. I lived there for a year. I've seen it. And the same for Wyoming, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. They all have parts of their state where that really matters.

America has long stood before the world as an exceptional country.

Talking to my Senate Republican colleagues about climate change is like talking to prisoners about escaping. The conversations are often private, even furtive.

Across our small globe, dawn sweeps each morning, lighting cities and cottages, barrios and villages. Whoever and wherever you may be, you can step out into that morning sunrise and know, from our American example, that life does not have to be the way it is for you.

When I was first elected to the Senate, I was fortunate to be appointed to the Intelligence Committee. There, I saw up close the dedication and commitment of the men and women of our intelligence agencies.

It would be a sorry world in which corporations engaged in fraud could pull the screen of the First Amendment over any investigation of their scheme.

The power the fossil fuel industry exerts over Congress is polluting American democracy, the propaganda it emits through its front groups is polluting our public discourse, and, of course, its carbon emissions are polluting our atmosphere and oceans - it's a triple whammy and a disgrace.

America's exceptional nature confers upon us responsibilities. We are not exceptional because we say so; we are exceptional because, over and over, we do exceptional things - things like what Generals Marshall and MacArthur accomplished putting Europe and Japan back on their feet after World War II.

It's pretty clear that Americans have a strong interest in knowing who's trying to influence their vote in elections.

Whatever the motivation of the 'Wall Street Journal' and other right-wing publications, it is clearly long past time for the climate denial scheme to come in from the talk shows and the blogosphere and have to face the kind of an audience that a civil RICO investigation could provide.

In the international contest of ideologies, it is not assured that ours will win; we have to earn the winner's laurel generation by generation. One way we earn it is by living our values as the world watches.

Protected free speech has boundaries, and one boundary is fraud.

The science-denial machinery is a serious adversary, and it has a big advantage over real science: it does not need to win its dispute with real science; it just needs to create a public illusion that there is a dispute.