Bernie Sanders Quotes

In my view, we need a massive federal jobs program which puts millions of our people back to work. We must end our disastrous trade policies. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. And we have to fight for pay equity for women.

Things are getting worse. You know, when you look at this campaign, and you realize the enormously serious issues this country faces, right, we got a collapsing middle class. We have more wealth and income inequality today than we've had since the 1920s. We have all of these enormous issues.

The reality is that we have one of lowest voter turnouts of any major country on earth because so many people have given up on the political process. The reality is that there has been trillions of dollars of wealth going from the middle class in the last 30 years to the top 1/10th of 1 percent.

Climate change is real, caused by human activity and already devastating our nation and planet. The United States must lead the world in combating climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and sustainability.

If we greatly expanded primary health care, lower the cost of prescription drugs, we take a giant step forward in lowering health care costs in America.

Every candidate running for president has got to answer the following very simple question: At a time when we need to address the planetary crisis of climate change, and transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainability, should we continue to give $135 billion in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade to fossil fuel companies?

The Republicans are many things, but they're not dumb. And if millions of people begin to stand up and fight back, they're going to be thinking twice about doing very bad things.

I come from a state that has virtually no gun control. And yet, at political peril, I voted for an instant background check, which I want to see strengthened and expanded. I voted to ban certain types of assault weapons which are designed only to kill people.

It would, I think, be hard for anyone to make the case that the United States is a just society or anything close to a just society. In America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant.

Democrats and progressives do well when the voter turnout is high. Republicans do well when the voter turnout is low.

We need a strategy. And the goal is to bring millions of people together.

If you`re a Republican politician and you`re seeing this guy [Donald Trump] saying crazy stuff and going up in the polls, what are you going to say, you`re going to say equally crazy or maybe a little less crazy stuff.

You go to Scandinavia, and you will find that people have a much higher standard of living, in terms of education, health care and decent paying jobs.

I am going to do my best to try to create a country in which children are not living in poverty, in which kids can go to college, in which old people have health care. Will I succeed? I can't guarantee you that, but I can tell you that from a human point of view it is better to show up than to give up.

Many White people are not sensitive to the kind of abuse that African Americans, especially younger African Americans, receive at the hands of police officers and police departments. I think for most Whites their experience with the police has been good or neutral because they don't interact with the police as much as those in the Black community.

I think, with Trump, the major point is this guy has business enterprises all over the world. And you're looking just at immense, immense conflict of interest.

Most people that I know don believe that a handful of corporations request sit together without disclosure, by the way, and pump hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process. That is not the democracy that many of us believe America should be.

In the last presidential election Obama and Romney raised about $1 billion each. The Koch brothers, the second wealthiest family in America, now say they will raise nearly $1 billion for the 2016 elections. When one family can raise as much as an entire party, the system is broken. This is oligarchy, not democracy. We must overturn Citizens United.

Believe me, every American, every person in this country, if I have anything to say about it, will know precisely what is going on with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because they are beginning to appoint people who are typical right-wing Republicans who want to privatize and cut Social Security.

When I talked about Boeing and I talked about General Electric, what I was referring to is an outrage... Right now you have a loophole such that these guys are putting their profits, multi-billion dollar profitable corporations putting billions of dollars into the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and other tax havens.

People are hurting and angry, and they want something to be able to stand up and fight for. That's what I believe the antidote is to Trumpism.

If the goal of health-care reform is to provide comprehensive, universal health care in a cost-effective way, the only honest approach is a single-payer approach.

I'm running for president, because as I go around this nation, I talk to a lot of people. And what I hear is people's concern that the economy we have is a rigged economy.

Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.

I'm not really opposed to people changing their minds. I'm much more concerned with people who never change their minds no matter what new information is available.

Freedom of speech, the right to dissent, the right to protest, that is what America is about. And politically every leader in this country and every American has got to stand up against any form of violence. That is unacceptable.

Who said that think we should normalize relations with Iran tomorrow? I never said that. I think we should move forward as quickly as we can.

We do not need to have a president who insults Mexicans and Latinos and Muslims and women and veterans and African-Americans, we need a president who brings us together, not divides us up.

Not just for the U.S. Senate but it also means for school board and city council. We need to revitalize American democracy. We need to have people at all - all over this country, having the courage to take on big money and demand a set of policies that work for all of us and not just for the few.

The middle class is collapsing and we are moving toward an oligarchic form of society, where the billionaires will control the economy and the political life of the country.

Let's be honest, dental care in America is extremely expensive, period.

The Palestinian people's needs must be respected.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are shining a national spotlight on the most powerful, dangerous and secretive economic and political force in America.

I think too many of my Republican friends are into perpetual warfare in the Middle East. And that scares the bejesus out of me.

The focus, to my mind, is to make sure that Donald Trump does not become president of the United States. I think by temperament he is unqualified to be president. I think his views - you have a guy who's running for president who rejects science, doesn't even believe climate change is real, let alone wants to do something about it, wants to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top two-tenths of one percent.

I have been in the Democratic Caucus in the Senate for over 24 years.

I fear very much for our kids, for low income people and for seniors.

We have more people in jail than any other country in Earth, disproportionately Latino and African-American.

Today, over half of American workers have less than $10,000 in savings and have no idea how they will be able to retire with any shred of dignity.

When the average Social Security benefit is $1328 a month, and more than one-third of our senior citizens rely on Social Security for Virtually all of their income, our job is to expand benefits, not cut them.

Every person in America will know what Donald Trump said and what he is doing.

Setting aside labels, I am somebody who believes that government in a democratic society should be representing the needs of the vast majority of the people who are middle-class and working families.

I do not accept the belief that the United States of America and our government can't stand up to the ripoffs of the pharmaceutical industry which charge us by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

Hillary Clinton and I have worked together on a higher education proposal which will guarantee free tuition in public colleges and universities for every family in this country making $125,000 a year or less. We're going to fight for paid family and medical leave. Those are the issues that the American people want to hear discussed, and I'm going to go around the country discussing them and making sure that Hillary Clinton is elected president.

If jazz education in our colleges were free to all it would provide thousands of good jobs in the music industry which has been taken over by corrupt millionaires and billionaires.

These are the same people who believe, in some cases, the federal government should not play any role in providing health care to our people or protecting the environment.

Subsidies for the oil, gas and coal industries are projected to cost taxpayers more than $135 billion in the coming decade. At a time when scientists tell us we need to reduce carbon pollution to prevent catastrophic climate change, it is absurd to provide massive subsidies that pad fossil-fuel companies' already enormous profits.

If Trump is elected president... I just don't know what America looks like four years after his election, in terms of the kind of bigotry that will be erupting, in terms of the kind of divisiveness that we will see, the kind of demagoguery that we will see.