Joe Biden

I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.

I support immediate financial assistance to the newly elected Palestinian president. Now, I don’t know what those numbers will be, and I don’t know how it’s going to be framed.

The greatest gift is the ability to forget – to forget the bad things and focus on the good.

But I was amazed at how organized the Palestinian election authority was, how competent they were in setting up their polling places and the poll workers they had.

Arafat’s departure has created an awesome opportunity.

Stop talking about how you care about people. Show me something. Show me a policy. Show me a policy where you take responsibility.

Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what’s called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

In our system leadership is by consent, not command. To lead a President must persuade. Personal contacts and experiences help shape his thinking. They can be critical to his persuasiveness and thus to his leadership.

So the indigenous population of what’s now the United States was ‘exterminated’, to use the word that the founding fathers used. Not totally, but that was what was considered the right thing to do. They replaced them and it became a kind of settler state, not an imperial state.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

Of course there are differences, but they are not fundamental. Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union is one of a number of factors that had the effect of essentially eliminating Third World voices. As long as [it] was there, two big gangsters parading around, there was some space for independent forces, there was room for non-alignment.

Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.

We can win an awful lot of people into the political spectrum, by offering something that is … radical.

Everyone who is critical of Israeli policy is deluged by crazed messages intended to flood their email system or, more insidiously, passwords are accessed and messages sent out under their name! I’m sure it’s illegal. It’s also an effort to undermine free speech.

Eventually we’re going to get something done and it’s going to be really, really good.