“Every single American — gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender — every single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society. It’s a pretty simple proposition.”

“That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie.”

“You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.”

“all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.”

“I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.”

“Indeed, it's not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead, representatives choose their voters.”

“For if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

“All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.”

“Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.” 

“We have our own ways, our own memories, and what has happened between all of us is hard to undo.”

“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”

“Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters. But I don't think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way-in their own lives, at least- to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves. ...I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but they recognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting. They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”

“Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the subjects they're teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools.”

“There's no such thing as a vote that doesn't matter.”

“And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter, whose long battle with leukemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for the health care reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care. I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father, but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd listening to that father's story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes, because we knew that little girl could be our own.”