Now, let me be clear. While I have always approached this relationship — Mitch McConnell

"There was no involvement whatsoever."

"I do support the Federal Water Quality Protection Act. I actually worked with Senator Barrasso to introduce it and will take a vote to move the bipartisan bill forward this afternoon. A bipartisan majority of the Senate supports the Federal Water Quality Protection Act. What it says is pretty simple. If the administration is actually serious about protecting waterways and not just cynically using this regulation as a ploy to extend the bureaucracys reach, then it should follow the proper process to get to a balanced outcome. It should appropriately consult with the Americans who would be the most affected by the regulation, especially farmers, ranchers, and small businesses, not to mention the homebuilders, manufacturers, mine operators, and utility providers that would be particularly impacted in my State. It should appropriately consult with the States. It should actually conduct the regulatory impact analyses required of it. In short, what this bipartisan bill would do is require the administration to actually follow the balanced approach it should have followed in the first place. It is commonsense, bipartisan legislation that would protect our waterways while protecting the American people from a heavy-handed regulation that threatens their property rights and their very livelihoods. A similar bill has already passed the House with bipartisan support. Americans in places like Eastern Kentucky have suffered enough from this administrations regulatory onslaught already. This latest regulation threatens to turn the screws even tighter for almost no benefit at all. I call on every colleague to join me in standing up for the middle class instead of defending cynical, job-crushing regulations. I ask them to join me in supporting the bipartisan Federal Water Quality Protection Act this afternoon."

"Nobody is happy about losing lives but, remember, these are not draftees. These are full-time professional soldiers."

"We need to say to everyone on Election Day, “Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job." (National Journal): What’s the job? The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

"Mr. President, allow me to say a few words about the Speaker of the House. There is a lot you can say about John Boehner. He loves his breakfast every morning at Petes Diner. He is a fan of the tie dimple. He is one of the most genuine guys you will ever, ever meet. I know because we have fought many battles together in the trenches. He never breaks his word. He never buckles in a storm. What is amazing is how we have had such a frictionless relationship, especially when you consider that old House saying: The other party--that is just the opposition. But the Senate--that is the enemy. That may have been true of past House and Senate leaders, but it wasnt true for us. Though you might not expect it, I am a little more Bourbon and John is a little more Merlot. I lecture on Henry Clay. John sings "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah." But I have always considered John an ally. I have always considered John a friend. It is hard not to like him, and it is hard not to admire what John has accomplished in his career. As a concerned Ohioan, he took on a scandal-plagued incumbent in a primary and won. As a freshman Congressman, he took on money laundering schemes and banking scandals involving powerful Members and prevailed. As an engineer of the Contract with America, he took on Democrats decades-long power lock and triumphed. As an ex-member of leadership once considered politically dead, he knew he had more to offer and convinced his colleagues that he did. As the inheritor of a diminished and dispirited House minority, he dared to believe conservatives could rise again and help grow the largest Republican majority since bob-haired flappers were dancing the Charleston back in the 1920s. John Boehner has wandered the valley. John Boehner has also been to the mountaintop. John Boehner has slid right back into the valley, and then ascended to great heights yet again. He does it all with hard work. He does it with an earnestness and an honesty I have always admired."

"“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” “Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.” , The Atlantic, (January, 2011)"

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"