Beto O'Rourke

“The government at all levels is overly represented by white men. That's part of the problem, and I'm a white man.”

“I'm pretty - I'm pretty animated.”

“Here's what we know: after the Secure Fence Act, we have built 600 miles of wall and fencing on a 2,000 mile border. What that has done is not in any demonstrable way made us safer.”

“The world wants to know - is the future a democratic one or an autocratic one? And I want to make sure that the United States leads on that, clearly that it's democratic.”

“We toured the U.S. and Canada for two years, which was a lot of fun. It was very much a do-it-yourself, punk-rock ethic of booking your own shows, sometimes sleeping on the floor of the club you had played or meeting folks that would take you in, or sleeping on the side of the road or at rest stops in the car.”

“We can either be governed by fear - fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, call the press the enemy of the people, tear kids away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border - or we can be governed by our ambitions and our aspirations and our desire to make the most out of all of us. And that's America at its best.”

“Some will criticize the Green New Deal for being too bold or being unmanageable. I tell you what, I haven't seen anything better that addresses this singular crisis we face, a crisis that could, at its worst, lead to extinction. The Green New Deal does that. It ties it to the economy and acknowledges that all of the things are interconnected.”

“We're all connected, related, part of one another's lives through the stories we tell ourselves and each other. For good and for bad.”

“In terms of immigration, we're seeing a lot of Democrats and Republicans use the really elastic term, 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform,' and they don't totally understand what that means. For us in El Paso, it's part of a larger discussion about the nature of the border.”

“I don't know that my colleagues in Congress really care about what happens here in El Paso and in Juarez. They care what happens in their home district.”

“There were absolutely times in my life when I tried to get people to call me Robert.”

“I'm for the DREAM Act. It makes so much sense. Following the implementation of the DREAM Act, we'll have a case study we can point to where we can say that we provided a path to citizenship or legal involvement in the community for these young immigrants, and the sky didn't fall.”

“We cannot sacrifice our humanity in the name of security - or we risk losing both.”

“I don't know how old I was when I first started going to shows, maybe 14 or 15, but very quickly, I discovered Dischord Records in D.C. and loved all the music on that catalog. I was a big Rites of Spring fan, Minor Threat, of course.”

“The bottom line is that I'm very, very proud of my mom.”

“El Paso in many ways is the Ellis Island for Mexico and much of Latin America.”

“One overlooked great 1980s rock n' roll band, maybe punk rock - they were on SST Records, same label as Black Flag - is this band called the Leaving Trains.”

“It's nuts to me that people want to take a picture with me or want to tell me a story about their family. If they want to give it to me, I'll always take it. It's never intrusive.”

“In the age of Trump, we need to be aware of emotional rhetoric and its power regardless of whether or not it's based in fact.”

“I was born in '72, and my dad was county judge of El Paso from '82 to '86. He was just as independent as he could be, and had an amazing joy in life and in being with people, which, from my perspective as a kid, was that he was always going to do the right thing, and damn the consequences - political or otherwise.”