America now stands as the world's foremost power. We should be proud: Not since the age of the Romans have one people achieved such preeminence. But we are not Romans; we do not seek an empire. We are Americans, trustees of a vision and a heritage that commit us to the values of democracy and the universal cause of human rights.
It's hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.
I refuse to stand by while our democracy is trampled by politicians more concerned about amassing power than helping the people who sent them to Washington in the first place.
Our purpose now is to reclaim democracy itself. We are here to affirm that when Americans stand up and speak their minds and say America can do better, that is not a challenge to patriotism; it is the heart and soul of patriotism.
I think that our own crisis of democracy is in its own way affecting our ability to leverage in the same way that we used to in the world.
There is no greater breach of the public trust than knowingly misleading the country into war. In a democracy, we simply cannot tolerate the abuse of this trust by the government.
We do have to take the long-term view. And long term, the question to ask ourselves is whether America should attack others pre-emptively, whether she should embroil herself in wars far away from our soil, and try to bring democracy by force to the rest of the world.
The Ukrainian people should not be coerced. Make no mistake: the US stands together with the Ukrainians aspiring for democracy.
When President Bush sees America, he sees only a military superpower. I see a moral and idealistic beacon. Mr. Bush may talk about democracy all he wants, but it is not democracy to wilfully disdain and heap scorn on world opinion. We do not command moral leadership by starting pre-emptive wars.
Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops. We will ask questions and we will defend our democracy.
If you want to be a Jewish state and you want to remain a democracy, you have to have a two-state solution.
The fact is that you literally, by definition, cannot have a Jewish state and a democratic state and have a whole bunch of Palestinians in it who are living under military rule while the rest of the country is living under civil rule, and they have different rights and different - it's just not a democracy.
We still have a lot of work to do to protect our own democracy.
Just the fact that we can't pass budgets in our Congress, just the fact that we are gridlocked in our own democracy, the fact that everybody who travels can see that we're not investing in our airports, in our rail, in our infrastructure and so forth, people are noticing a United States that is not getting the job done in some ways.
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