Joe Biden

There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son, or daughter, or your wife or your husband, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner than later.

I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people, women, that they can’t control their bodies.

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

You know you’re a success when you look at your kids and realize they turned out better than you.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

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

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.

We don’t need a weakened government but a strong government that would take responsibility for the rights of the individual and care for the society as a whole.

You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible – not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide – I mean, wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert – not only did He do things like that, but, after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That’s the story of Noah. I mean, that’s beyond genocide – you don’t know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive – that’s supposed to be gentle and wonderful.

It appears, our partners thought that this would never affect them, this counterproductive politics of restrictions and sanctions. But now we are seeing that this is happening.

I don’t read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland.

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster’; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

I always touch people, because I know that there’s a level of anxiety, people are teary or they’re nervous, and I just try to physically hold them and bring them down and say: ‘We’re here. I’m just Michelle.’

The goal of Socialism is Communism.

From the point of view of the policy makers, the long-term future of the country doesn’t matter so much. What matters is just those sectors of society that sustain concentrated privilege.

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

Everybody has a right to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.