Joe Biden

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.

I believe health care is a basic right. If education – you’re entitled to an education, why wouldn’t you be entitled to adequate health care? Period.

I believe the measure of a man isn’t just the road he’s traveled; it’s the choices he’s made along the way.

But I was amazed at how organized the Palestinian election authority was, how competent they were in setting up their polling places and the poll workers they had.

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you’ve resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, ‘You’re an asshole,’ which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say, ‘That’s idiotic,’ when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

Any people has a right to self-determination, and now in Europe the process of diluting national sovereignty in the framework of a united Europe is more accepted.

Debate cannot be stilled, and indeed, in a properly functioning system of propaganda, it should not be, because it has a system-reinforcing character if constrained within proper bounds. What is essential is to set the bounds firmly.

So it seems like if they want to reduce abortion, the best thing to do would be to support contraception – but they’re against contraception, too, because contraception and abortion decouple sexuality from procreation. That’s why I think religious preoccupation with abortion is largely about controlling the sexuality of women.

Organization and education, when they interact with each other, they strengthen each other, they are mutually supportive.

Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet.

..reading a book doesn’t mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

I think we have to push robustly for the limitation of arms supplies … Israel is after all facing an investigation … for war crimes, [at the International Criminal Court] as indeed are the Hamas forces on a much different or lesser scale.

The centuries-old history and culture of India, majestic architectural monuments and museums of Delhi, Agra and Mumbai have a unique attractive force.

In my personal opinion, Russia is no less democratic than it used to be. It is a democratic country. It is democratic enough.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy.

It doesn’t matter who they vote for, they always vote for us…

Obviously these [white-guard] emigres enjoy the right of asylum existing also in the U.S. So far as we are concerned we would never tolerate a single terrorist in our territory regardless against whom he would contemplate his crimes. Apparently the right of asylum receives broader interpretation in the U.S.A. than in our country.