Giving a veteran a flag is not a substitute for giving our vets the quality health care they were promised

And the banks - hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.

It simply isn't fair for senators to cut to the front of the line when seniors around the country have been forced to wait for hours to get a flu shot.

Millions of Americans take vitamins safely every day, including me. Vitamins and mineral supplements taken in recommended doses are safe. It's the designer supplements that are worrisome.

We can't do much about ensuring that the homeland is safe if our local police and sheriffs' departments don't have the personnel they need to keep our streets and neighborhoods secure.

It is unacceptable that disabled veterans in Illinois rank at the bottom of the list when it comes to disability pay. We owe our disabled veterans more than speeches, parades and monuments.

We will have health care reform in America.

Our party is a diverse one, as is my home state of Illinois.

There is no room for legal hair-splitting when it comes to the humane treatment of detainees - not in a nation founded on the rule of law and respect for human rights.

We have 11 million people in this country that need a pathway to citizenship.

You know, the purpose of reconciliation is to avoid the filibuster. The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.

Shed the yesteryears, embrace the present as a gift and the future as a possibility

Everything is dangerous to him that is afraid of it.

Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.

I have so many different projects, I hear voices in my head - the characters talking all at once - and I have to write to make them stop.

Get rid of all the hesitation, it's time for you to seize the day.

Nobody out-rednecks the great state of America.

Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing you must invent.

Liberty is a soul’s right to breathe.

Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains

I'm sure that many people who are involved in an environmental effort ... they will be pretty much encouraged by this recognition.