I have done a lot of work for affordable housing, rental housing. I understand the rap on me and other liberals is, oh, we push poor people into homeownership. And it's exactly the opposite of the case. We were trying to prevent those kinds of bad loans.
I'm antisocial - there's no question about it.
I hope we will not so characterize religious people as being so narrow and so biased towards people not of their own religion that they cannot even work with them in this common cause to which you say they are committed.
It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.
Community action is as valuable a principle on the international level as it has been domestically.
It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.
When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.
I was still closeted, but from the day I decided to run for office, knowing that I was gay, I decided that I would, of course, still be closeted but that I would work very hard for gay rights. It would be totally dishonorable, being gay, not to do that. So I had that as kind of a secondary agenda.
But on those occasions when I do strongly disagree with the Democrats and I don't say anything, I think I forfeit my right to have people pay attention to me when I say the things that I don't like about what Republicans are saying.
I will tell you, I'm a lousy cook, but I think I'm a pretty good judge of a good meal.
I have been mislabeled as a big advocate of low-income home ownership over rental.
I am very proud of the role I played in getting legal equality for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and in helping get rid of the prejudice by being visible about it, helping to block the conviction of Bill Clinton of impeachment.
The fact that they're a congressionally chartered group should no more incline people to give to that group than the fact that it's National Pickle Month should make them eat more pickles.
I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.
What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.
Before this learning experience, I had assumed that with regard to programs that sought to help people out of poverty, the political world was essentially divided into two camps: conservatives who opposed these for a variety of reasons, and liberals who supported them.
Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about.
Pat Moynihan could write books with one hand and legislate with the other. I can't; I have a short attention span. The slightest distraction would take me away from writing.
The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.
The Clinton tax increase - which was an increase in taxes primarily on upper-income people - not only made the tax code more nearly progressive, it preceded one of the most productive economic periods in American life.
