Student Senate Quotes

As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today.

The students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I'd had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential.

Do not enter the ministry if you can help it . . . If any student in this room could be content to be a newspaper editor, or a grocer, or a farmer, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a senator, or a king, in the name of heaven and earth let him go his way; he is not the man in whom dwells the Spirit of God in its fullness, for a man so full of God would utterly weary of any pursuit but that for which his inmost soul pants.

A first bill for the abolition of compulsory student union fees failed in 2004 but it was back as soon as the government won control of the Senate.

In 1868, the Georgia legislature voted to expel all its Negro members-two senators, twenty-five representatives-and Turner spoke to the Georgia House of Representatives (a black woman graduate student at Atlanta University later brought his speech to light): Mr. Speaker. . . I wish the members of this House to understand the position that I take. I hold that I am a member of this body. Therefore, sir, I shall neither fawn or cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg them for my rights. . . I am here to demand my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood.

In a 2006 speech then-senator Barack Obama gave to a group of college students, he offered these sage words about success: “Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages

Thousands of times the French saw, over the course of those four years, in shop windows, bottles of Saint-Emilion or of Meursault arranged in neat pyramids. They’d approach the window, enticed, only to read on a placard: artificial display. So it was with Paris: it was nothing more than an artificial display. Everything was hollow and empty: the Louvre without paintings, the Chamber without deputies, the Senate without senators, the Lycée Montaigne without students. The artificial existence that the Germans maintained, the theatrical events, the races, the miserable and lugubrious festivals held only in order to show the universe that France was saved because Paris still lived: all were the strange consequence of centralization.

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

Then there were those who were thrilling to Senator Sanders, who believed that Bernie would be the one to give them free college, to solve climate change, and even to bring peace to the Middle East, though that was not an issue most people associated with him. On a trip to Michigan, I met with a group of young Muslims, most of them college students, for whom this was the first election in which they planned to participate. I was excited that they had come to hear more about HRC's campaign. One young woman, speaking for her peers, said she really wanted to be excited about the first woman president, but she had to support Bernie because she believed he would be more effective at finally brokering a peace treaty in the Middle East. Everyone around her nodded. I asked the group why they doubted Hillary Clinton's ability to do the same. "Well, she has done nothing to help the Palestinians." Taking a deep breath, I asked them if they knew that she was the first U.S. official to ever call the territories "Palestine" in the nineties, that she advocated for Palestinian sovereignty back when no other official would. They did not. I then asked them if they were aware that she brought together the last round of direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians? That she personally negotiated a cease-fire to stop the latest war in Gaza when she was secretary of state? They shook their heads. Had they known that she announced $600 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza in her first year at State? They began to steal glances at one another. Did they know that she pushed Israel to invest in the West Bank and announced an education program to make college more affordable for Palestinian students? More head shaking. They simply had no idea. "So," I continued, "respectfully, what is it about Senator Sander's twenty-seven-year record in Congress that suggests to you that the Middle East is a priority for him?" The young woman's response encapsulated some what we were up against. "I don't know," she replied. "I just feel it.

ran—at separate times—a boutique investment banking firm and a small mortgage company. He served as the Treasurer for the multinational vitamin manufacturer USANA Health Sciences years before becoming CFO for MonaVie. Devin squeezed in two brief stints in government, including two years working for Jake Garn on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee Staff and another year working for an independent state agency called USTAR, where he helped foster technology entrepreneurship during Governor Jon Huntsman’s administration. Devin is proud to be a Ute, having graduated from the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, which recognized him as a Distinguished Alum in 2006. He also earned an MBA at Cornell University where he ran the student newspaper, Cornell Business.

Many Americans wonder why Robert Kennedy took no action against Lyndon Johnson if he suspected the vice president’s complicity in the murder of his brother. In fact, we now know that Johnson was concerned that Robert Kennedy would object to his immediate ascendancy to the presidency. The very fact that Johnson would worry about something so constitutionally preordained virtually proved Johnson’s fear that Kennedy would see through his role in the murder. I now believe that Johnson’s call to Robert Kennedy to obtain the wording of the presidential oath was an act of obsequiousness to test Kennedy as well as an opportunity to twist the knife in Johnson’s bitter rival. We now know that the “oath” aboard Air Force One was purely symbolic; the US Constitution elevates the vice president to the presidency automatically upon the death of the president. Johnson’s carefully arranged ceremony in which he insisted that Jackie Kennedy be present was to put his imprimatur and that of the Kennedys, on his presidency. Additionally, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, had recently been blocked from elevation on the federal bench by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This impediment would be removed under President Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy knew his brother was murdered by a domestic conspiracy and, at a minimum, suspected that Lyndon Johnson was complicit. Kennedy would tell his aide Richard Goodwin, “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”86 In essence, Kennedy understood that with both the FBI and the Justice Department under the control of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, there was, indeed, nothing he could do immediately. While numerous biographers describe RFK as being shattered by the murder of his brother, Robert Kennedy was not so bereaved that it prevented him from seeking to maneuver his way onto the 1964 ticket as vice president. Indeed, RFK had Jackie Kennedy call Johnson to lobby for Bobby’s selection. Johnson declined, far too cunning to put Bobby in the exact position that he had maneuvered John Kennedy into three years previous. Robert Kennedy knew that only by becoming president could he avenge his brother’s death. After lukewarm endorsements of the Warren Commission’s conclusions between 1963 and 1968, while campaigning in the California primary, RFK would be asked about his brother’s murder. In the morning, he mumbled half-hearted support for the Warren Commission conclusions but asked the same question that afternoon he would tell a student audience in Northern California that if elected he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder. Kennedy’s highly regarded press secretary Frank Mankiewicz would say he was “shocked” by RFK’s comment because he had never said anything like it publicly before. Mankiewicz and Robert Kennedy aide Adam Walinsky would ultimately conclude that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy, but to my knowledge, neither understood the full involvement of LBJ. Only days after Robert Kennedy said he would release all the records of the Kennedy assassination, the New York Senator would be killed in an assassination eerily similar to his brother’s, in which there are disputes, even today, about the number of shooters and the number of shots. The morning after Robert Kennedy was murdered a distraught Jacqueline Kennedy called close friend New York socialite Carter Burden, and said “They got Bobby, too,” leaving little doubt that she recognized that the same people who killed her husband also killed her brother in law.87

The John Locke Foundation also sponsored the North Carolina History Project, which aimed to reorient the state’s teaching of its history by providing online lesson plans for high school teachers that downplayed the roles of social movements and government while celebrating what it called the “personal creation of wealth.” In a similar vein, Republicans in the state senate passed a bill requiring North Carolina’s high school students to study conservative principles as part of American history in order to graduate in 2015. The bill stressed the “constitutional limitations on government power to tax and spend.” “It’s all part of Pope’s plan to build up more institutional support for his philosophy,” said Chris Fitzsimon, director of NC Policy Watch, a liberal watchdog group.

The essence of bigotry is denying other people the same rights you have. For generations, it was racial bigotry which provoked filibusters to prevent the Senate from voting on bills to extend civil rights to blacks. But bigotry is bigotry, whether it is racial bigotry, religious bigotry or political bigotry…Although this was the bigotry of the right, the bigotry of the left has since become pervasive, not just in politics but also in our educational system and in much of the media. Again and again, the left has claimed rights for itself that it denies to others…Ideological bigotry has become the norm on even our most prestigious campuses, where students can go for years without reading or hearing anything that challenges the left vision. —Green Bigots versus Human Beings;

Feinstein has been a China-booster from the early 1990s, often backing pro-Beijing legislation in the Senate. Her husband has strong business links in China, which she denies have had any influence on her. In 1997 she compared the Tiananmen Square massacre to the shooting of four students at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970, and called for a joint US–China commission on the two nations’ human rights records.35 Lowe left Feinstein’s office after the FBI warned her about him. China’s intelligence agencies also target Westerners not of Chinese heritage for information-gathering. In 2017 a long-serving State Department employee, Candace Claiborne, was indicted for accepting money and gifts from Chinese agents in exchange for diplomatic and economic information.36 She had been targeted by the MSS’s Shanghai State Security Bureau after she asked a Chinese friend to find a job in China for a family member. Claiborne maintained secret contact with MSS agents for five years, supplying them with information in return for help with her ‘financial woes’. She was sentenced to forty months in prison. In the early 1990s Britain’s MI5 wrote a protection manual for businesspeople visiting China; the advice remains relevant today: ‘Be especially alert for flattery and over-generous hospitality … [Westerners] are more likely to be the subject of long-term, low key cultivation, aimed at making “friends” … The aim of these tactics is to create a debt of obligation on the part of the target, who will eventually find it difficult to refuse inevitable requests for favours in return.

When right-wing rock star Ted Nugent drew national ire for calling President Obama a “subhuman mongrel,” some prominent conservatives like Rick Perry initially came to his defense, while others dodged media questions about the racially charged insult. But after months of “listening sessions” with African American civic leaders, students, and government officials, Rand had come to appreciate how hurtful comments like those could be, even when coming from unserious celebrity provocateurs. One night after Nugent made the comment, Rand emailed Stafford saying he wanted to denounce the remark. Stafford was sympathetic, but he cautioned that, politically, it could cause problems on the right. As a father, doesn’t it offend you? Rand wrote back. Stafford glanced up from his phone at his adopted daughter, who was black, and then at his wife, who had been fuming about Nugent’s comment ever since she heard it. “You’re right,” he told Rand. That night the senator tweeted, “Ted Nugent’s derogatory description of President Obama is offensive and has no place in politics. He should apologize.

Consider the following dialogue between an instructor (A) and two of his students (B, C) A. What happened in the senate 1 on the Ides of March 44 B.C.? B. Napoleon stabbed Mrs Thatcher. C. Brutus did stab Caesar. In the senate it happened. It was Cassius that stabbed him.

He told them a story—“the little baby in the cradle,” as a student would call it. “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby—any baby—might grow up to be President of the United States.

Would you care to share with the rest of the class what is so funny?” Madison gulped. Ms. Healy was staring hard at Madison’s PalmPilot, which was absolutely forbidden in class, along with cell phones, CD players, and any other distracting electrical equipment. Madison instantly started vamping. “Well, Ms. Healy, I was just musing on how ridiculous a scarlet would be today, and who would have to wear one--senators, actors, teachers, even a few of our presidents. In fact, there would probably be more people wearing the scarlet letter than not wearing it.” Ms. Healy’s cold blue eyes looked huge through her extra-magnified glasses. “This is funny?” Madison swallowed hard. “I guess it’s really more ironic, wouldn’t you say?” Ms. Healy, who knew Madison as a straight-A, straight-shooter kind of student, softened a little. “‘Ironic’ is indeed the perfect word for it,” she said with a brisk nod. “Now put the personal digital assistance away and pay attention, Ms. McKay.” As Ms. Healy walked back to the front of the room, Henry Cooney, Madison’s partner in chem lab, mouthed the words, “Nice save.” Madison wiped some imaginary sweat off her forehead with her hand and tried to focus once again on the lecture. She forced herself to keep her eyes glued to Ms. Healy and soon found herself wondering what had turned the teacher into such an old grump. She was clearly smart and sometimes very funny, in a droll sort of way. Take away those awful glasses, let her hair out of that tight metal barrette at her neck, and Ms. Healy could almost be considered attractive. Maybe she’d had some brush with failed love that had made her go sour. Or worse yet--what if she had never had any brush with love at all, and this dried-up old prune was what Ms. Healy had become?

Educators in 19 states, including Indiana and Missouri, can still discipline a student by paddling. While most of the states that allow corporal punishment are in the South, it is also legal in Idaho and Wyoming. New Mexico became in 2011 the most recent state to ban the practice. At the time, Vernon Asbill, a Republican state senator and retired educator, argued, “The threat of it keeps many of our kids in line so they can learn.” A 2010 bill in the U.S. House to ban corporal punishment in schools died in committee.

was one of just 27 women out of 235 students in my class at Yale Law School. The first woman partner at the oldest law firm in Arkansas. The first woman to chair the national board of the Legal Services Corporation. The person who declared on the world stage that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” The first First Lady to be elected to public office. The first woman Senator from New York. In fact, for a few weeks, I was both. By a quirk of the calendar, I was sworn in before Bill left office. And I was the first woman to be nominated for President by a major political party and win the national popular vote.

Comedy, especially in the form of satire, also specializes in deriding the self-importance of human beings. For instance, the notion that the United States Senate is “the world’s greatest deliberative body” warrants laughter and ridicule, given the absurdity of its proceedings. To take another example, it is no accident that dictators especially dislike being mocked, for they are deserving targets of mockery, given their grandiloquence and pathetic lust for political power. Are figures like Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro not utterly ridiculous, deserving of contempt and laughter? True, they are also dangerous individuals, responsible for the deaths of many innocent persons, but recognizing that fact is compatible with mockery of their absurd personas. Of course, the self-importance of human beings is not limited to politicians and dictators. Fortunately, tenured academics have little in the way of political power beyond their own institutions (and not much there, either), but it would be difficult to find a class of persons whose endeavors are both more trivial and more self-prized. When a full professor publicly excoriates a graduate student for allegedly misunderstanding some arcane point, it is certainly abusive but is also comical when one considers the abuser’s self-seriousness in the face of trivia. In a case like this, the victim deserves sympathy, but the abuser deserves (among other things) contemptuous and dismissive laughter. As with so many other human enterprises, academia deserves to be lampooned, as it is in the novels of David Lodge, for example.

As the Senate’s Church Committee would note: “In 1967 alone, the CIA published or subsidized over 200 books, ranging from books on African safaris . . . to a competitor to Mao’s little red book, which was entitled Quotations from Chairman Liu.” One such book, produced by the Domestic Operations division—the one that was monitoring Oswald—told the story of “a young student from a developing country who had studied in a communist country.” According to the CIA, that book “had a high impact in the United States.

In 1958, Representative David H. Glass introduced a bill in the Mississippi Legislature entitled “An Act to Discourage Immorality of Unmarried Females by Providing for Sterilization of the Unwed Mother under Conditions of this Act,” which provided for the chancery court to order the sterilization of single mothers, most of whom were Black. The bill passed the House by a vote of 72 to 37, but was ddropped in the Senate after national protest, which included a pamplet entitled Genocide in Mississippi circulated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In July 1968, Strider admitted on the floor of the Mississippi Senate that he had paid for votes during his 1951 campaign for Tallahatchie County sheriff. Strider disclosed this as the Senate debated a bill that provided for absentee voting for teachers and students. “In those days you didn’t win elections, you bought them,” he told his colleagues. He said that he paid out a total of $30,000 for blank absentee ballots reserved for people who had indicated they would not be present on Election Day. Reporter Bill Minor, who knew the former sheriff, said years later that Strider had paid $25 to each of those willing to cast their ballot in his favor.

Every year millions of American men buy televisions in order to watch football. The various companies that produce TVs are aware of this, and try to run advertisements for their contraptions that feature games. Unfortunately, the NFL only sells footage to its official television company. That means if, say, Zenith is the NFL’s TV of choice, Panasonic, Sony, and myriad other entities can’t use league action. “So every year—every single year—I get calls from the companies, wanting to purchase USFL stock footage,” Cohen said. “I averaged about $100,000 a year for a long time. Dom was right.” Don’t blink, or you might miss ubiquitous snippets of USFL game footage. That game Julie Taylor was watching in the student lounge on Friday Night Lights? Blitz-Bandits at Tampa Stadium. The “Bubble Bowl” game in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Band Geeks”? Bandits-Showboats at the Liberty Bowl. A Scientology advertisement stars Anthony Carter scoring a touchdown for the Panthers; Russ Feingold, a United States senator running for reelection in 2010, ran a spot with Gamblers receivers Clarence Verdin and Gerald McNeil dancing in the end zone;

Miss Pauline had explained to Mr. Williams that students still coping with traumatic events were likely to have increased activity in the amygdala. At the same time, there was typically decreased activity in those parts of the frontal lobe where learning takes place. Mr. Williams could go over and over a given lesson, but if a student was in a triggered state, he or she might not learn readily, no matter how good the teacher was. One could take any of the well- rounded, assured students who served on the Senate and put them into a similar predicament— bomb their home city until it became unlivable, separate some of them from their parents, force them to witness atrocities, starve them for a while, transport them to a foreign country where they understood nothing, give them a teacher who spoke a language they could not comprehend— and most of them, too, would have fallen quiet.

There was one issue that frustrated the students the most by far. It wasn’t Syria or Iraq or surveillance or any foreign policy topic that had been in the news or that I had been quizzed on in my “murder boards” preparing for Senate confirmation. It was guns. Second and third on the list of frustrations, confusions, and concerns were racism and police brutality.

The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty.Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts. . . . Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda. —Rule APM 0-10, University of California, Berkeley, Academic Personnel Manual. Inserted by UC President Robert Gordon Sproul, 1934. Removed by a 43–3 vote of the UC Academic Senate, July 30, 2003.