Quotes By Charles Schumer

I'd like to see the health care professionals making decisions, not some bureaucrat in Indianapolis working for an insurance company.

America is a place where we all come together. It is a place of consensus.

So I want my kids to go to public schools because I think it's a better education overall.

The dome of the U.S. Capitol has fallen into severe disrepair... As the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which oversees matters of the Capitol's physical plant, I have serious concerns about the consequences of omitting this funding from the stopgap spending measure.

But I don't think the Democratic Party is at eye level with the middle class.

Do not let arguments of expediency persuade you. That is the slow road to oblivion. That is the tortured path to undoing step by step, bit by bit, as the river creates a canyon, the way of life that we love.

I told the President, I told Rahm Emanuel and others in the administration that I thought the policy they took to try to bring about negotiations is counter-productive, because when you give the Palestinians hope that the United States will do its negotiating for them, they are not going to sit down and talk.

Arafat was a barrier to peace.

As long as the Palestinians send terrorists onto school buses and to nightclubs to blow up people, Israel has no choice but to build the fence.

My father, Abe, was a small businessman. For 32 years, he ran an exterminating company. That may explain why our family always associated the smell of roach spray with love.

But these days there are a lot of younger people who would like to go into teaching but don't because the economic opportunities are sometimes elsewhere.

I think teaching should be an exalted profession, not a picked-on profession.

Giving up even an ounce of precious freedom is a very serious thing to do.

Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that's not what any of us should want from our judges.

Well, the tough thing for them is that the Republican primary is pretty far over to the right, just as the Democratic primary is further over to the left than the average voter in each party.

A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure.

Middle class people, I think they realize that Romney is not for them because of his narrowness, but they want to make sure that Barack Obama is focused on them with things that will make a difference. They know he tried, but they also know that it didn't do as well as they would have liked.

I'm strongly for a patient Bill of Rights. Decisions ought to be made by doctors, not accountants.

I made education the highest priority of my campaign - actually education and jobs - and the reason is a simple one: I think the future of America depends on it.

To those like Mitt Romney who want to take us backwards, let's send a strong message in November: as we say in Brooklyn, 'Fuhgeddaboutit.'

Inaction is perhaps the greatest mistake of all.

Republicans always try to paint Democrats as weak on defense. This time, they can't. After all, Mitt Romney's idea of an overseas accomplishment is sending U.S. jobs there.

Palestinians don't really believe in a state of Israel. They, unlike a majority of Israelis, who have come to the conclusion that they can live with a two-state solution to be determined by the parties, the majority of Palestinians are still very reluctant, and they need to be pushed to get there.

If we are going to stay a great power and I hope and pray we will we need the truth. We need to know what is going right and we need to know what is going wrong. There is no greater time than now.

Mitt Romney's only bottom line is the one at the end of his own bank statement. The problem is that he confuses his own narrow, self-interest - and that of people like him - with the national interest. He thinks as long as we do right by the Mitt Romneys of the world, America will be just fine.

You know, we have three branches of government. We have a House. We have a Senate. We have a President.

We tend to talk, Democrats, as a party, in legislative terms.

You do have to change things as warfare changes.

You have to show Israel that it's not going to be forced to do things it doesn't want to do and can't do.

Mitt Romney would move the Court even further right, putting landmark decisions like Roe v. Wade at risk. Some say Romney would repeat the past. I disagree - he'd be worse.