Al Gore

While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward.

The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder.

No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shape the soul and let the glory out.

When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler.

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives – and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

The agents of [government] regard the wealth of their master as inexhaustible; are careless at what price they buy … at what price they sell.

If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn’t happen by laws of nature. And it doesn’t happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success – in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.

To those who oppose us, we say, ‘Strike the woman, and you strike the rock.’

If not me, who? And if not now, when?

My wife is Mexican and my constituency is very, very multicultural.

[on Osama bin Laden’s death] no attempt whatsoever that I can see to arrest him and put him on trial, to go through that process.

The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society.

The news that appears on social media, let’s say on Facebook, is drawn from the major media…The fact remains that the basic source of news, information, opinion and analysis is still the major media.

The Creel [propaganda] Commission…succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist [U.S.] population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.

You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

The problems we face now – poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them in the first place.

Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard… to secure for themselves a government which will allow them to acquire the things they covet and which will not debar them from the peaceful enjoyment of those possessions.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.