Al Gore

We ought to approach this challenge [of global warming] with a sense of profound joy and gratitude: that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.

While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward.

As I have said for many years throughout this land, we’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.

No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives – and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key: when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. What is missing is a sense of urgency.

The Federal Government should be the last resort, not the first. Ask if a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or whether it can better be handled privately, by voluntary organizations, or by local or state governments.

Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican – and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows.

It is difficult for me to imagine what personal liberty is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.

Don’t automatically obey Presidential directives if you disagree or if you suspect he hasn’t considered key aspects of the issue.

We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions, nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs.

You must obey the law, always, not only when they grab you by your special place.

A country in which the people are not healthy physically and psychologically, are poorly educated and illiterate, will never rise to the peaks of world civilization.

The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren’t being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.

The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks…. And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.

If wall street can borrow money at 0.75% interest, so can college students. We need to stop treating students as profit centers.

This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity.

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

[on Les Paul guitars] It’s the construction and sound of it. With this material, the wood and neck construction and scale length really yields a different sound all together, and I just gravitate towards that. I pretty much get everything I want with it, so I’m very satisfied.

The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.

He told me was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars.I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even answer him.But that experience also taught me something.Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president.