Three-quarters of [Bashar Assad] country is displaced. It's in Jordan, it's in Lebanon, it's in Turkey, and in the desert. The threat is that those people in the desert and others could become the next acolytes of ISIL if we don't find a way to join together to go after ISIL.
John F. KerryWhat we have to do is go on the offensive. [The science on climate change] has been maligned and misinterpreted, and we need to fight back... [P]eople [need to] stop being moved by these talk show [hosts] and start looking for the facts themselves.
John F. KerryI personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that. However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions.
John F. KerryConfronting climate change is, in the long run, one of the greatest challenges that we face, and you can see this duty or responsibility laid down in scriptures, clearly.
John F. KerryIf you can resolve this transition of [Bashar] Assad, that is absolutely possible, but you have to have a clarity for everybody about the way forward.
John F. KerryViolence has to end. And Israelis have a bright to defend themselves against any violence that is attacking innocent people with a knife in the old city in Jerusalem or elsewhere. No country should be under siege like that.
John F. KerryThank you very much for contacting me to express your support for the actions of President Bush in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf.
John F. KerryMiddle class Americans don't ask for special favors, they just want basic fairness, and a President who fights for that ideal.
John F. KerryThe fact is that you literally, by definition, cannot have a Jewish state and a democratic state and have a whole bunch of Palestinians in it who are living under military rule while the rest of the country is living under civil rule, and they have different rights and different - it's just not a democracy.
John F. KerryUnlike Washington, which is stuck in ideological gridlock, Americans feel the impact of climate change in their own hometowns and they know something must be done.
John F. KerryWe need a new approach to national security - a bold, progressive internationalism that stands in stark contrast to the too often belligerent and myopic unilateralism of the Bush Administration.
John F. KerryThe best way to begin genuine bipartisanship to make America stronger is to work together on the real crises facing our country, not to manufacture an artificial crisis to serve a special interest agenda out of touch with the needs of Americans.
John F. KerryGeorge Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them.
John F. KerryThe agreement is fundamentally that we want to try to resolve this. The agreement is that ISIL is a threat to everybody, and we need to come together to find a way to fight ISIL. The agreement is that we want to save Syria, keep it unified, keep it secular. So surely in those very fundamental principles on which we could agree.
John F. KerryAmerica is the one that leads the effort to make sure the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea is protected.
John F. KerryIf you don't believe ... Saddam Hussein is a threat with nuclear weapons, then you shouldn't vote for me.
John F. KerryAmerica has an ability to try to make some things happen that other countries don't necessarily have.
John F. KerryI accept that friends of ours have decided that the President's non-strike has somehow impacted perceptions of us. But I believe they are dead wrong and I think the critics are dead wrong, and here's why. The President [Barack Obama] made his decision to strike. He announced his decision to strike publicly. And the purpose of the strike was to get the chemical weapons out of Syria. That's the purpose.
John F. KerryIsrael gets more than half of all the military purchasing assistance that America gives to all the nations in the world.
John F. KerryIn a few years, you should be able to plug your American-made plug-in hybrid into the outlet in your garage, so that you never use a drop of gas on your daily commute. This won't happen overnight, but I promise you, it is closer than you think.
John F. KerryYou might not see climate change as an immediate threat to your job, your community, or your families," Kerry said. "But let me tell you, it is." He continued, "climate change is directly related to the potential of greater conflict and greater instability. I'm telling you that there are people in parts of the world - in Africa today, they fight each other over water. They kill each over it. And if glaciers are melting and there's less water available and more people, that is a challenge we have to face.
John F. KerryIf we can't have a serious conversation without politicizing it on cable TV and making it a scoring point for one day, we're in trouble.
John F. KerryWhat we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.
John F. KerryI think it's time we had a President who will provide the only real economic security: good jobs. A President who will provide middle class payroll tax relief to get money in the pockets of workers who will spend it, not more tax giveaways for those at the top to stimulate the economy in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. A President who will index the minimum wage to inflation and raise it from a 30 year low, not increase the tax burden on the middle class and those struggling to join it.
John F. KerryIn order to have the best intelligence in the world to know who the terrorists are and where they are and what they're plotting, you've got to have the best cooperation you've ever had in the world.
John F. KerryPeople talk about [Bashar] Assad running Syria. He doesn't control his own country. He's down to about 20, 25 percent of the country. What is this fiction that he is somehow the only person who can save Syria? There's - with Assad there, there is no Syria. So that's what the Iranians and the Russians need to really begin to focus in on.
John F. KerryUnder this [Bush] Administration, America's middle class has been abandoned -- its dreams denied, its Main Street interests ignored and its mainstream values scorned by a White House that puts privilege first.
John F. KerryIt's likely that people will say we're all interested in destroying - ISIL is a threat to everybody. There isn't one country in the region that doesn't despise what ISIL stands for and is doing and that doesn't want to eliminate them.
John F. KerryIf [Bashar] Assad himself could save this whole process by saying, "I will engage in a managed transition where we all work together to stabilize the government, save the institutions of government, and turn on ISIL and preserve Syria." That could happen. It all depends on one man, and Russia and Iran should not be so stubborn here that they tie this whole thing up simply because of one person.
John F. KerryWe do have to take the long-term view. And long term, the question to ask ourselves is whether America should attack others pre-emptively, whether she should embroil herself in wars far away from our soil, and try to bring democracy by force to the rest of the world.
John F. KerryI voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations.
John F. KerryWe need a leader who has a sense of balance, an understanding of the ebb and flow of history and a sense of our country's unique place in it. This is a foreign policy debate, and you cannot conduct foreign policy without a sense of what we are fighting for. And any President who can reduce the conduct of this country's affairs to a morning's attack by a bunch of demented fascists does not, in my view, understand what this great nation is all about.
John F. KerryThis revolution began with young people in Syria demonstrating because they wanted a future. They wanted opportunity, education, and so forth. They went out and they did it. Thugs came out and beat them up. The parents got angry that the thugs beat the kids up, and they went out and demonstrated, and they were met with bullets. They were killed. That's how this began.
John F. KerryThat's what I am standing up for - Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state living side-by-side in peace and security with its neighbors.
John F. KerryWe cannot continue to see the Middle East in the context of 9/11. We must see it in the context of 2011.
John F. KerryIf you don't have two states, you have one state, already the non-Jewish population outnumbers the Jewish population in one state.
John F. KerryThere is no bigger judgment for a president of the United States than how you take a nation to war.
John F. KerryThe threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation.
John F. Kerry