Cory Booker

“There's too much judgment out there. Really what we need to be doing is just all of us finding our own paths towards living the best lives we can live as clearly and boldly in accordance with our own personal values. And that's what I'm trying to do.”

“In college, I was a fiercely committed Democrat - a meeting with Jack Kemp, then Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, challenged my blind partisanship.”

“The disgust and latent hostility I felt toward gays were subcategories of hatred, plain and simple.”

“The richness of America is that we are diverse. We're not Sweden. We're not Norway. We are a great American experiment. And as soon as we start trying to forget race or turn our back on race, number one, we don't confront the real racial realities that still persist.”

“I'm very concerned about U.S. food policy.”

“I wrote down the grades I wanted in every class.”

“A more courageous empathy is needed in our country to see the struggles of people from factory towns to farm towns to city towns who can't even afford the rent in their cities anymore because costs are going so high.”

“When people jump on your mistakes, don't hide from them; let people know that you're human, too.”

“I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.”

“The joke I always make is I'm either running for reelection, running for Senate, running for governor, or running for my life. The latter is also a viable possibility.”

“We also must pull from our highest ideals of justice and protect against those ills that destabilized our economy - like predatory lending, over-leveraged financial institutions and the unchecked avarice of the past that trumped fairness and common sense. Our platform calls for significant cuts in federal spending.”

“Food is at the core of our lives in ways we don't always think about - how it affects our environment, how it affects our health and well-being, how it affects the expense of society, the expense of government.”

“I am a geek nerd who happened to have a temporary period of jockiness.”

“Everybody wants to find their soul mate, and I'm no different. That's definitely what I want in the future.”

“I respect and value the ideals of rugged individualism and self-reliance. But rugged individualism didn't defeat the British, it didn't get us to the moon, build our nation's highways, or map the human genome. We did that together. This is the high call of patriotism.”

“Our nation was founded with a bunch of founding legislators who joined together to move our country out of the blocks and get us started, and every generation since then has found a way to advance the ball down the field.”

“We are at our best when we give the ultimate sacrifice of putting other people, putting the country, putting our communities ahead of ourselves.”

“America has seen enough of a handful of people growing rich at the cost of our nation descending into economic crisis.”

“I want to be myself. I want to be as authentic as possible.”

“We live in a nation where, when New Jersey figures out how to do something and does it well, and shows progress, it affects other states.”