Quotes from Jared Polis

While still in college, I started my first Internet company - American Information Systems - a dial-up Internet provider in the Internet's formative years.

Members of the LGBT community should feel welcome and know their rights are protected regardless of what state they reside in.

Agribusinesses should never dictate the quality of school meals.

Technology improves our lives in so many ways - from our toasters, ovens, and refrigerators at home to our computers, fax machines, and BlackBerrys at work. Technology makes once-burdensome tasks easy and fun.

It's critical to show that we can meet our commitment to students with disabilities without raising taxes and without increasing the deficit. In the past, there's been strong support for full funding and I'm still hearing that from many of my colleagues.

I believe that in order to sustain a governing majority, the Democratic Party has got to learn that it can govern without raising taxes.

The passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - or stimulus bill, as it is often called - is a perfect example in which dire circumstances necessitate immediate action. But with such large amounts of taxpayer money at stake, a hastily developed, under-thought-out plan could have been disastrous.

Co-sponsoring a bill is fairly easy, like a group project which you work on with others.

I'm too busy thinking what I'm going to say next to remember what I've said, but my staff tells me I'm sometimes funny. Not always on purpose, though.

That's why I created the New America School - to fill the cracks in our public education system.

I can be happy in the private sector, the non-profit sector, or the public sector.

When I was first elected to the Colorado State Board of Education in 2000, we had to carry a big binder filled with hundreds of pages to every meeting. By 2004, the State Board had gone paperless. We even persuaded the less-tech-savvy members to use laptops to pull up their information during meetings.

I remember well my first 300 baud modem, which dialed up and scrolled text at an agonizingly slow speed.

Gay marriage won't be more of an issue 25 years from now than interracial marriage is today.

Many rogue sites exist to make a profit and others are enormously expensive to maintain. If they don't have the resources to continue stealing intellectual property, they'll wither away.

To be effective in Congress, you must focus. With so many issues and debates occurring at any given time, it is easy to spread yourself too thin and lose sight of your goal.

The NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times a year since Congress gave it broad new powers in 2008.

Congress seems to thrive on breaking promises and passing unfunded mandates down to local government. It's really just a matter of priorities.

I oppose piracy and want to see intellectual property protected because that is what fosters and rewards innovation. But SOPA won't accomplish a meaningful reduction in piracy and causes massive collateral damage to the Internet ecosystem.

Members of Congress wear two hats: one as Washington legislator, the other as listener and community leader back home.

Democratic, Republican members of Congress get along fine. But what you have is this institutional Hatfield and McCoy sentiment coming from our constituents, where the base of both sides doesn't want people to get along. But the majority of Americans, I feel, the majority, they are in the middle. They actually do want both sides to get together.

In my opinion, real reform, which lowers costs and ensures all Americans get the quality, affordable health care that they deserve, cannot be accomplished without a robust public option.

We can pass practical, comprehensive immigration reform.

I have a horrible sense of direction.