Bernie Sanders Quotes

What does a political revolution look like? It means that 80 percent of the people vote in national elections, not 40 percent. It means that billionaires can't make unlimited campaign contributions and buy and sell politicians. It means that the U.S. government represents the needs of all the people, not just the 1 percent and their lobbyists.

So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.

Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government's justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

For more than a century, states have sought to protect the integrity of the democratic process at the state and local level by regulating corporate spending in elections.

Our federal government, which was intended to operate as a very limited constitutional republic, has instead become a virtually socialist leviathan that redistributes trillions of dollars. We can hardly be surprised when countless special interests fight for the money. The only true solution to the campaign money problem is a return to a proper constitutional government that does not control the economy. Big government and big campaign money go hand-in-hand.

[Bernie] Sanders is fighting against a system. He sounds good. The system is rotten to the core.

We need a growing middle class, not one that has been disappearing for 40 years. We need a vibrant one person-one vote democracy, not one which is dominated by billionaire campaign contributors. It's time for a political revolution. It's time to make our government work for all of us, and not just the 1%.

The billionaires and their super PACs increasingly control the American political process. This is not democracy. This is not what brave Americans fought and died to defend. This is oligarchy. This is government of the few, by the few and for the few. We must overturn Citizen United and move to public funding of elections.

When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it's obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.

PACs corrupt the system. They handle vast amounts of money and the money corrupts.

At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.

Public control of the political process requires public financing. The restoration of our American Democracy depends upon public financing.

The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money -- the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity.

There is still the illusion that if we could declare corporations are not people or that money is not speech, all would be solved. Regardless of the good in those ideas, it wouldn't.

I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing.

I've always been a big supporter of the Constitutional right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition government for redress of grievances. It's just that I never envisioned it taking the form of thousands of people screaming 'you asshole!' at me.

Public disclosure of campaign contributions and spending should be expedited so voters can judge for themselves what is appropriate.

If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century - and the economy - around.

I want to congratulate Senator [Bernie] Sanders for the extraordinary campaign.... He has spent his long career in public service, fighting for progressive causes and principles, and he has excited millions of voters, especially young people.

I think politics are a part of life, so I have no resistance to it, but it's not something I set out to do.

I was previously involved in local and state politics, but not national, because grassroots democracy starts at the bottom. This was the breaking point for me, though - and it made the case that in order to fight locally, we have to fight nationally; we can't afford to neglect any area of life in this democracy.

I'm going to fight for every person in America who believes government should serve the people, not the donors and not the special interests.

I would like to have an ample fund to spread the light of Republicanism, but I am willing to undergo the disadvantage to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics for unworthy purposes.

We have been lied to and terrorized by our own government, and it is time to take action.