Quotes from Bernie Sanders

If we truly intend to make America great, we will strive to be a nation that has eliminated poverty, homelessness, and diseases of despair, where hard work is rewarded with a living wage, and where those who are too old or too infirm to work are protected by a safety net that guarantees no American will be destitute. That's not a utopian vision or some foreign construct.

Instead of spending more money on the military than the next ten nations combined, we should lead the world in diplomacy and international collaboration, especially when it comes to preventing wars and combating climate change.

The simple truth is that unfettered capitalism is not just creating economic misery for the majority of Americans, it is destroying our health, our well-being, our democracy, and our planet.

The rise to power of a right-wing lunatic in a free election in Germany.

A college degree today is the equivalent of a high school degree 50 years ago. We need tuition-free public colleges.

Today in America, more than 2 million people are in jail, disproportionately black, Latino, and Native American. That is a greater number of inmates than in any other country on earth—including China, which has a population four times greater than ours and an authoritarian government that does not tolerate dissent.

While an exceptionally wealthy few wallow in affluence and become exponentially richer with each passing day, the majority of Americans live lives of quiet desperation.

Mark my words, there will be an intensive effort to privatize Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.

The bottom line is that everything is connected to everything. Our political task is nothing less than the transformation of our nation. Health care for all, absolutely. But in order to create a healthy society, we also need to end poverty and provide decent-paying jobs for all people. We need a strong educational system, a clean environment, and equal opportunity for everyone regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality. These, in fact, are all health-related issues.

Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.

Four years later, in 2020, we won the popular vote against a huge field of candidates in the first three Democratic primary states—Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. The result: a panicked political establishment came together behind Joe Biden, the one candidate they thought could beat us. The other candidates were asked to drop out.

Maybe it's a radical idea, but I believe a job should lift workers out of poverty -- not keep them in it.

Our struggle is to end a system that evaluates "worth" as a measure of market profitability, a system in which we are asked to believe—based on salaries paid—that the star athlete who helps a billionaire team owner increase his bottom line is "worth" more than a thousand teachers who help children escape poverty.

Our struggle is against a system where the top twenty-five hedge fund managers in the United States pocket more money than 350,000 kindergarten teachers combined. When did we the people make that determination? When did we decide that a drug company executive at Moderna can collect a "golden parachute" valued at $926 million for not working, while EMT workers who work around the clock to save lives make as little as $40,000 a year?

The vast majority of Americans recognize that Eugene Victor Debs was right when he said, a century ago, that "I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

During this first term [as Burlington mayor in 1981] I discovered that the city was wasting substantial sums of money on its insurance policies. Companies, year after year, were getting the city's business at substantially higher than market rates. I instituted a radical socialist concept, 'competitive' bidding, which saved the city tens of thousands of dollars.

In other words, we have a major American (and global) industry whose business model is designed to attract young people to their products, chemically addict them, cause them terrible suffering and death, and then pass the hundreds of billions a year in medical costs on to the taxpayers.

Health care for all, absolutely. But to create a healthy society, we also need to end poverty and provide decent-paying jobs for all people. We need a strong educational system, a clean environment, and equal opportunity for everyone regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or nationality. These, in fact, are all health-related issues.

its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.

in a sense, both of them faced the same opponent: an outside super-PAC funded by wealthy donors who wanted to beat progressives standing with the working class of this country.

If a nation is morally judged by how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable among us, our health care system fails miserably.

Thirty-second TV ads may help win some elections, but they are not going to bring about the fundamental change our country needs.

At the heart of the crisis is the reality that we really do not have a health care system—like most modern industrialized countries do. What we have is a non-system that is enormously complex, bureaucratic, and fragmented. It leaves parents bewildered and caregivers frustrated.

It is said that wealth cannot buy happiness. Perhaps that is true. But it is undeniably true that poverty can lead to despair