Anybody who pretends that how you read the 10th and 11th Amendment doesn't have a fundamental impact on the things we care about is kidding themselves. They're either uninformed or they're kidding themselves.

We spent $100 billion on education, saving the education system 300,000 teachers who were laid off because of the recession. We also put tens of thousands of lower income kids in college through Pell grants which has fundamentally all their opportunity. We did the same thing with regard to what we did on transportation. So we weren't just trying to - we knew we had to do something big to keep us from going over the cliff into a depression and pull us out of hole.

One of the reasons to pick the cancer effort is to demonstrate to people that there's not much beyond our capacity. It will take time, but if we focus, if we narrow down where the bottle necks are and we move, there's never been a problem we can't solve.

I have never left another senator out to dry. Never.

Raising minimum wage doesn't just benefit the workers behind me, it creates a proven ripple effect that increases wages all the way up the scale. ... Let's get the facts straight, only 20 percent of people making the minimum wage are teenagers. The rest are hardworking adults, many of them with families, and I mean hardworking.

When you question a man's motives, when you say they are acting out of greed, they are in the pocket of an interest group, et cetera. It's awful hard to reach consensus. It's awful hard to reach across the table and shake hands. No matter how bitterly you disagree, though, it is always possible if you question judgment and not motive.

We have the greatest resource universities in the world, the only place in the world. We have the most productive workforce in the world. We have the most agile venture capitalists in the world. We have a situation where right now in the United States of America, we are near energy independent. North America is beginning to be the epicenter of energy. What is it that makes people think that this is not going to be the American century? I don't get it.