Quotes from Sheldon Whitehouse

In the international contest of ideologies, it is not assured that ours will win; we have to earn the winner's laurel generation by generation. One way we earn it is by living our values as the world watches.

When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms.

How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - that's not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.

The Founding Fathers built our judicial system to withstand the special interest pressures that beset the political branches of government.

No one has a First Amendment right to lie to a federal agency in order to claim an improper tax status in order to avoid legal disclosure requirements on political spending and thereby receive undue tax benefits. That's a criminal false statement and possibly a fraud.

My thesis is that government is not, in fact, broken. It's just listening to the wrong people, and it's listening to all of this quiet influence. So it's a very robust operation that operates kind of under the surface.

The oceans are a way of life. We fish; we sail; we have a robust marine economy.

We would like the rest of the world to look up to American democracy. So when there is this kind of folly taking place, it makes it difficult for other rational nations to look up to American democracy.

I don't believe that there is anybody who denies climate change in the Democratic caucus. Everybody accepts that it is a real problem.

Each generation in this country gets the responsibility of being the ambassadors for this American democracy that our parents and grandparents fought, bled, and died for.

The big polluters are confident in their grip on Congress. They have basically achieved control of the Republican Party, and as a result, they are basically able to block action in Congress that the public needs and the country deserves.

I've met students across Rhode Island who rely on Pell Grants. They work hard, play by rules, and are doing everything they can to get the education they need for the jobs of tomorrow.

Senators who once supported common-sense legislation have gone silent as stones under the threat of the polluters' spending.

Putting a price on carbon pollution is one of the best things we can do to stem the tide of climate change.

These core principles - helping patients, preventing medical errors, promoting best practices and improving quality - are the reasons that health IT is featured in both the 2012 Republican platform and 2012 Democratic platform.

Rhode Island works hard to reduce air pollution in our communities. We passed laws to prohibit cars and buses from idling their engines and to retrofit school buses with diesel pollution controls. But there is only so much a single state can do, particularly against out-of-state pollution.

Not only will a carbon fee reduce carbon emissions, it will force big polluters to pay for the damage their pollution does to public health and the environment, generating billions in new revenue for the American people.

We can reduce our deficit, and do it in a much more balanced way than sequestration, simply by fixing our tax code to get rid of needless giveaways.

As a Senator from Rhode Island, I wish that once - just once - the fossil fuel industry and their paid-for PR machine would concede that burning their product causes real harm to other people.

The best way to shine a light on all of this 'dark money' flooding into our elections would be for Congress to pass legislation requiring all organizations to disclose their political spending in a timely manner.

To be clear, I don't know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don't have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it's all smoke and no fire. But there's an awful lot of smoke.

The Founding Fathers set up the American judiciary as a check on the excesses of the elected branches and as a refuge when those branches are corrupted or consumed by passing passions.

The bottom line is that our kids deserve a brighter future. They deserve an opportunity to attend college, regardless of their wealth or class. And our economy needs an educated work force that can compete in the global race for jobs.

America's exceptional nature confers upon us responsibilities. We are not exceptional because we say so; we are exceptional because, over and over, we do exceptional things - things like what Generals Marshall and MacArthur accomplished putting Europe and Japan back on their feet after World War II.