Joe Lieberman

"I was in Washington in the summer of 1963, [and] had the opportunity to participate in Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington, which culminated at the Lincoln memorial in his soaring 'I Have a Dream' speech. For me, this was America at its best. Hundreds of thousands of us, all religions, races, and nationalities, joined together peacefully but powerfully to petition our government to right the wrong of racial bigotry."

"We must rise above politics and restore independence to the White House, not compromise our economic or environmental or health security for political contributors or extreme ideologues … We must rise above partisan politics and stand up for our values here at home, because family and faith and responsibility matter more than power and partisanship and privilege. … I intend to talk straight to the American people and to show them that I'm a different kind of Democrat … I will not hesitate to tell my friends when I think they're wrong and to tell my opponents when I think they're right."

"I have consistently opposed a flag-burning amendment, and voted against its passage. Flag desecration is hateful and worthy of condemnation, and I would support any statory means possible to curtail desecration of the flag. But I believe that the importance of the Bill of Rights -- our nations founding document -- requires us to establish a very high threshold for agreeing to change it. does the amendment address some extreme threat to our country, or redress some outrageous wrong? In this case, abhorrent though flag desecration may be, it simply does not meet that test."

"The best thing we did with the Patriot Act was to sunset it. Almost 800 foreign nationals, immigrants, mostly Arab-Americans or people who looked like Arab-Americans, were arrested, put in jail, held without charges, no notification for their families and no right to counsel. That's un-American and I'll fight to end that. If we fight the terrorists who attacked us because of our liberties by compromising our liberties, shame on us."

"It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be commander-in-chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation's peril."

"I urge the Bush Administration to rethink its priorities. We can't talk about community values without being prepared to invest in those very same communities."

"Shame on us if 100 or 200 years from now our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are living on a planet that has been irreparably damaged by global warming, and they ask, 'How could those who came before us, who saw this coming, have let this happen?'"

"I have great respect for Dick Cheney. I don't agree with a lot of things he said in this campaign. He was a very distinguished Secretary of Defense, and I don't have anything negative to say about him."

"There is also a magic in reading. Books have taken me to places I never thought I would visit, introduced me to people I never thought I would meet, and transported me to times past and futures imagined I never though I would experience."

"If you just look at the majority of American Jews, they are more like Bernie Sanders than Joe Lieberman, in terms of secular versus Orthodox, or non-nationalistic versus nationalistic, or moral versus corrupt. There are all these articles that keep coming, saying that Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about his Judaism enough, or contrasting him with Joe Lieberman as the American Jewish icon, because — because why? Because Lieberman wears a yarmulke? Because he lends his name to extremist movements, like Christians United for Israel? To me that’s not Judaism, and for the press and even the Jewish community to implicitly assume that these extremes are our norms — that is what is self-loathing, that is when we become self-hating."

"The last straw for me was Joe Lieberman. For years I've been voting for Democrats on the grounds that at least the party is not run by right-wing lunatics, but if you listen to Lieberman's rhetoric, he's a Christian rightist in Jewish drag...Both Gore and Lieberman are pandering to religious and moral conservatives, again ignoring the secularists and social liberals who are the backbone of the party. Neither of them ever met a civil liberty he liked. I am chilled by their demagogic attacks on popular culture."

"[The controversy surrounding Cannibal Corpse's lyrics] got to the point where it entered . That's something I never imagined, and I never heard [Senator] Joe Lieberman actually say these words, but he said this about us: "[Cannibal Corpse] is deplorable. They have a song about having sex with a severed head." I wish I could have heard him say that shit. I'd love that sound bite."