Charles Schumer Quotes

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

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.

The currency bill we have would finally do something for China`s rapacious policies.

Republicans always try to paint Democrats as weak on defense. This time, they can't. After all, Mitt Romney's idea of an overseas accomplishment is sending U.S. jobs there.

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.

Democrats don't relate to middle-class people.

People are angry and dispirited about government because of a failure to do something about crime.

My car was broken into four times before it was stolen. That can drive you nuts - the repetition. I'd wake up every morning and put on my jeans over my pajamas to run down and see if my car was still on the street. That's not a pleasant way to live.

You do have to change things as warfare changes.

You know, my name .... comes from the word shomer, guardian, watcher. My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov. And I believe Hashem [Orthodox for God] actually gave me that name. One of my roles, very important in the United States senate, is to be a shomer - to be a or the shomer Yisrael. And I will continue to be that with every bone in my body.

Bigotry has always been the poison of America, and we oughta do everything to eradicate it with no excuses or explanations.

The companies move labor to the lowest-cost markets. And so I don`t - I used to support these agreements. In the Congress, I lost the AFL-CIO endorsement a few years because I supported them. But when middle class incomes are declining, these agreements don`t work well for America.

When you run for president you have certain obligations. One of them would be to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest.

No one believed [the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens] was tough enough on illegal immigration, and it didn't give enough flexibility on future legal immigration.

I'm going to focus on people and what they need, not on name calling between politicians.

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

When Mitt Romney says he wants to reform the tax code, hold on to your wallets.

If the Saudis were culpable, they should be held accountable. If they had nothing to do with 9/11, they have nothing to fear.

I think on this issue more than any other we're going to see sort of a bipartisan longing to get something done, and hopefully you're not going to find the fisticuffs that you would find on lots of other issues. I think you'll be able to glean a sense of progress without us revealing the specifics.

Jewish voters care. They want someone who's good on Israel and who's good on Jewish issues. But they also want somebody who's going to be pro-choice and pro-gun control and pro-gay rights. To the vast majority of the Jewish community, just being good on Israel or on Jewish issues is not enough.

Crime can be a unifying argument - not an argument that people use as a code for us vs. them.

If you have a sharp bold economic message, you can unite everybody.

Biking through New York's boroughs in 2005, I thought about some old friends, Joe and Eileen Bailey. Though they are imaginary, I frequently talk to them.

The Democratic Party was always there on crime, but in the past we let the ideologues on the left dominate. The Republicans may still let the ideologues on the right dominate.

An economic message, an economic platform unites the factory worker in Scranton, the young woman in Los Angeles struggling to pay her college debt and the single mom in Buffalo who's on minimum wage.

Certainly any president - Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative - should keep an open mind until they get the briefing.

I think, the left makes a mistake. If you look particularly at the state levels, violent repeat criminals are not punished enough. The average murderer is sentenced to 17 1/2 years but serves six. The average rapist is sentenced to 10 years but serves about three and a half. The average mugger is sentenced to five years and serves little more than one.

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.

Our job is going to be to hold Donald Trump and the Republican majority accountable.

President Trump ought to realize, he's not campaigning anymore. He's president. And instead of talking about how many people showed up at his inauguration, he ought to be talking about how many people are going to stay into the middle class and move into the middle class.

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.

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

We're here to tell the NRA their nightmare is true.

We're going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We're going to beat guns into submission!

We all agreed on the framework: Pass DACA protections and additional border security measures excluding the wall. We agreed that the president Donald Trump would support enshrining the DACA protections into law. What remains to be negotiated are the details of border security with a mutual goal of finalizing all the details as soon as possible. While both sides agreed that the wall would not be any part of this agreement, the president made clear he intends to pursue it at a later time, and we made clear that we would continue to oppose it.

We can't have a Twitter president. This is serious stuff, this governing.

I think there's going to be a lot of Americans who are really willing to be much more active than they were before, because they're worried about where Trump is headed.

Unfortunately, the administration's plan is an ounce of cure for a pound of problems.

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

The NRA is weakening but the opposing forces are stronger. A member of Congress has and still does pay a price for voting against the NRA. But now a member pays a price for voting with the NRA, too. In many districts, the price is higher when a member votes with the NRA than against the NRA. The public is outraged.

We repeal sanctions, it tells Russia, go ahead and interfere in our elections and do bad things; it tells China, it tells Iran. That would be terrible.

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

What we are going to do as Democrats is put together a really strong platform that focuses on jobs and economic issues.

When the President starts talking about something, it makes a difference.

When you lose an election, you don't blink, you don't turn away. You look it right in the eye and say, why did we lose?

This is government's primary function - to keep us safe - and when large percentages in America don't feel safe, they start asking: What am I paying my taxes for? What is government all about?

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

Substantively Democrats are much closer to where the American people are than Republicans are.