A Quote by Tim Kaine

It is so painful to suggest that we go back to think about these days where an African-American could not be a citizen of the United States. — © Tim Kaine
It is so painful to suggest that we go back to think about these days where an African-American could not be a citizen of the United States.
Donald Trump always puts himself first. He built a business career, in the words of one of his own campaign staffers, "off the backs of the little guy." And as a candidate, he started his campaign with a speech where he called Mexicans rapists and criminals, and he has pursued the discredited and really outrageous lie that President Obama wasn't born in the United States. It is so painful to suggest that we go back to think about these days where an African-American could not be a citizen of the United States.
I think that [Donald] Trump is brilliant to raise this issue. When my son, Gabriel, and his wife, Deb, was pregnant, I said, You got to come home. I want my grandson to be president of the United States. He has to be born in the United States.Now, a child of a citizen of the United States born abroad or born wheresoever is a citizen if that's - he or she so chooses. So there's no doubt but that Ted Cruz is a citizen of the United States.
At home in the states, I think there's a tendency in the states to go for the latest, greatest thing. The latest, greatest is the latest greatest. I think when you're talking about France, England, things like that, they look for the history of an artist and they go back when it comes to music like this anyway. They will go back a little bit further. I think the United States is very knowledgeable and it's a good place to play.
The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that.
Never mind that from the 1600s until the late twentieth century the population the United States was 85% white, 12% black, and there have been changes demographically in the United States since the days of its founding. So they're trying to tell you that the United States' greatness happened because of diversity. Well, go back and look at the days the country was founded, and they do. When they do that, they see how racist and bigoted this country was. they see the seeds for bigotry and racism and discrimination were sown at the founding, is how it's now taught.
You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away.
The Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color. Neither does it know any difference between a citizen of a state and a citizen of the United States.
I sit here as the first African-American attorney general, serving the first African-American President of the United States. And that has to show that we have made a great deal of progress. But there's still more we have to travel along this road so we get to the place that is consistent with our founding ideals.
That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.
An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.
The United States has a long tradition of preserving the all-American outdoor experience, dating back to the days of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Germany is a capitalist state nurtured carefully and brought back to prosperity by the United States, and it is very loyal to the United States. I don't even think the Germans enjoy full sovereignty. There are some things which they cannot do if the United States doesn't wish them to do it.
When the president talks about tax reform, he talks about the people who will benefit. He talks about American jobs. He talks about the fact that we're going to be taking money that's overseas and bringing it back to the United States so that it will employ American workers. I think that focus again on the American working and middle class is- is-is to me the most thoughtful and, in some ways, the most genius part of Trump's approach to politics.
I cannot see that any rational American. . . could conceivably try to fulfill the major national purposes of the United States through the United Nations. It would be comparable to the United States seeking to pass its legislation through the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.
I think that we're at an alarming moment in American political development and maybe in world political development, because the United States is so influential. If the trends of the last thirty or forty years are not halted and reversed - and those trends include increasingly inequality, a crumbling public life, a disintegrating public infrastructure, an exhausted ecology, and a huge war arsenal, and more and more war making - then I'm rather gloomy about the prospects for the American future and the harm that the United States could do to the world.
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