Cory Booker Quotes

Are there any monuments built to demagogues? I just don't think so.

- Cory Booker

This is our history - from the Transcontinental Railroad to the Hoover Dam, to the dredging of our ports and building of our most historic bridges - our American ancestors prioritized growth and investment in our nation's infrastructure.

- Cory Booker

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.

- Cory Booker

I'm hopeful that at the end of my life, someone like Frederick Douglass would look at my life and say, 'Well done: you've proven yourself to be worthy of the legacy we left you.'

- Cory Booker

May we all, as a nation of believers, fight for the achievement of America; may we make sacrifices worthy of those proud men and women who fought for us, labored for us, bled soil from the beaches of Normandy to the fields of Gettysburg for us.

- Cory Booker

Stay faithful in things large and taking on the world, but stay faithful in those things small - because remember it's the small things, the size of a mustard seed, that ultimately moves mountains.

- Cory Booker

You can't have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation.

- Cory Booker

You have to understand the Newark Riots - a lot of people understand that the pain was the initial explosion of anger and alienation, but after that, the response, sending the National Guard troops - a lot of violence was carried out and perpetrated by those who were allegedly coming here to protect residents.

- Cory Booker

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.

- Cory Booker

I love mayors.

- Cory Booker

Patriotism is love of country. But you can't love your country without loving your countrymen and countrywomen. We don't always have to agree, but we must empower each other, we must find the common ground, we must build bridges across our differences to pursue the common good.

- Cory Booker

What happens once you get a felony conviction? Now you are entering this American caste system where you can't get a job, you can't get a loan, you can't get a Pell grant, you can't get public housing.

- Cory Booker

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.

- Cory Booker

The Constitution makes very clear what the obligation of the United States Senate is and what the obligation of the president of the United States is. To allow a Supreme Court position to remain vacant for well over a year cuts against what I think the intentions of the framers are and what the traditions of the Senate and the executive are.

- Cory Booker

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

- Cory Booker

Cities can be places that represent the best of our ideals: where Americans of all different backgrounds can come together and, through their interactions, and even through their unity, spawn true American greatness.

- Cory Booker

If I just retweet the nice things, it rings hollow after a while.

- Cory Booker

If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

- Cory Booker

Life is about, every single day, getting up to manifest your truth.

- Cory Booker

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.

- Cory Booker

Athletes are still exploited. If they blow out their knee, if they somehow don't meet the mandates of a coach, they lose their scholarship. They don't get their degree.

- Cory Booker

In Newark, we see a problem and want to seize it, but we run up against the wall of state government, the wall of federal government that does not have the flexibility or doesn't see problems, even. At the federal level, it's often a zero-sum game: If you win, I lose. At the local level, it's just not local that. It's win-win-win.

- Cory Booker

The fact that Newark is having poetry festivals and peace conferences - all of these things are building an undeniable thesis that our city is making incredible strides forward.

- Cory Booker

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

- Cory Booker

I know Donald Trump. I've met him; I know his family. I have love and friendship and affection for his family members. But I'm going to work very hard to ensure that he is not our president.

- Cory Booker

I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.

- Cory Booker

Patriotism is a love of country. If you love your country, you should love your countrymen and women. It doesn't mean you always agree with them or even like them. It is understanding that we have interwoven destiny.

- Cory Booker

Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

- Cory Booker

In America we have a Declaration of Independence, but our history, our advancements, our global strength all point to an American declaration of interdependence.

- Cory Booker

Let us declare that we are a nation of interdependence, and that in America love always trumps hate. Let us declare, so that generations yet unborn can hear us. We are the United States of America; our best days are ahead of us. And together, with Hillary Clinton as our President, America, we will rise.

- Cory Booker

There is too much disagreement for disagreement's sake. In a time of persistent challenges that still call into question our most sacred aspirations as a country, we cannot afford shallow callous divisiveness in our public debate.

- Cory Booker

You've got to be one that, wherever you are, like a flower, you've got to blossom where you're planted. You cannot eliminate darkness. You cannot banish it by cursing darkness. The only way to get rid of darkness is light and to be the light yourself.

- Cory Booker

You should be able to afford health care for your family. You should be able to retire with dignity and respect. And you should be able to give your children the kind of education that allows them to dream even bigger, go even farther and accomplish even more than you could ever imagine.

- Cory Booker

Hopelessness is a really toxic and dangerous state.

- Cory Booker

Do not forget from whence you've come.

- Cory Booker

Cities can become the engines that fuel our nation's growth and prosperity, and they can be wide gateways for families to achieve their own American dream of prosperity.

- Cory Booker

We need to look at the totality of the things that we're labeling as violent and really examine whether we need to have some more proportionality in terms of the punishment fitting the crime that's done. The bright line that we have right now, between violent and nonviolent, does not account for shades of gray.

- Cory Booker

We choose forward. We choose inclusion. We choose growing together. We choose American economic might and muscle, standing strong on the bedrock of the American ideal: a strong, empowered and ever-growing middle class.

- Cory Booker

If we want a great nation, we have to change it ourselves.

- Cory Booker

Tolerance says I am just going to stomach your right to be different. That if you disappear from the face of the earth, I am no better or worse off. But love - love knows that every American has worth and value, no matter what their background, race, religion, or sexual orientation.

- Cory Booker

As a government leader, I'm not going to sit on the sidelines and watch all these other sectors innovate. I'm going to do everything I can as a leader to be in that innovation, to be a provocateur for that innovation.

- Cory Booker

When they told me I couldn't sit on the Senate floor with an iPad - that the technology wasn't even permitted - I breathed deep and knew that I was going to have to start pushing.

- Cory Booker

My father was not going to let me sit back and just consume my blessings. He wanted me to contribute, and to do that, you have to be mission-oriented.

- Cory Booker

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.

- Cory Booker

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.

- Cory Booker

Small acts of decency ripple in ways we could never imagine.

- Cory Booker

There was a small point in my life in law school, right before I moved to Newark, when I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I felt so lost.

- Cory Booker

I debated between law school and divinity.

- Cory Booker

After Yale Law School, I was proud to try to live up to my parents' example and began my career working for The Urban Justice Center in the streets of Newark, organizing residents to fight for better housing conditions.

- Cory Booker

I am a Yale Law School graduate.

- Cory Booker

The majority of our criminals that we lock up are non-violent offenders.

- Cory Booker

We become distracted from productive labors by our perceived opponents; we become focused on them and not on our larger calling to advance our nation; our debate becomes more about scoring points against an adversary and less about advancing our common cause.

- Cory Booker

These false barriers that we've erected of space and race, all these illusions that we've allowed to infect us like toxins, we've got to rid ourselves of that. We are a better nation when we are ultimately united in a common purpose and a common cause.

- Cory Booker

We have a presidential nominee in Hillary Clinton who knows that, in a time of stunningly wide disparities of wealth in our nation, America's greatness must not be measured by how many millionaires and billionaires we have, but by how few people we have living in poverty.

- Cory Booker

If you grew up where I grew up, you would experience a very different criminal justice system than Camden, New Jersey.

- Cory Booker

Our platform emphasizes that a vibrant, free and fair market is essential to economic growth.

- Cory Booker

Kids born into certain ZIP codes will most likely have certain educational outcomes. And we've got to end that. If we end that, we explode economic development.

- Cory Booker

My generation of Americans, the scions of daring dreamers, the children of the fearlessly faithful and the offspring of many of history's most audacious actors - we, together, drink deeply from wells of freedom, liberty and opportunity that we did not dig.

- Cory Booker

No matter who you are, no matter what your color, creed, how you choose to pray or who you choose to love, that if you are an American - first generation or fifth - one who is willing to work hard, play by the rules and apply your God-given talents - that you should be able to find a job that pays the bills.

- Cory Booker

I reject the idea that the guy who comes out of Yale and goes to work in the projects in Newark is good, and the guy who goes to work for a white-shoe law firm is bad. We're all mountain rangers. We all have peaks and valleys.

- Cory Booker

When I go about my own politics, I meet Tea Party supporters who I can work with in Congress, that I find common ground with. I find Tea Party supporters who won't let me get a sentence out without judging me. To say that there is a 'Tea Party supporter' is a gross generality.

- Cory Booker

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

- Cory Booker

My dad set a clear model for me for what manhood was all about.

- Cory Booker

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

- Cory Booker

My simple point is that I judge a person's faith by how they live their life, not by the tenets of their religion. I've watched the holiest of people walk past somebody in need or treat their staff mean. To me, the beauty of faith is only seen when people live it consistently or struggle to do so.

- Cory Booker

Our platform calls for a balanced deficit reduction plan where the wealthy pay their fair share. And when your country is in a costly war, with our soldiers sacrificing abroad and our nation facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare - it's patriotism.

- Cory Booker

When your country is in a costly war, with our soldiers sacrificing abroad and our nation facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare - it's patriotism.

- Cory Booker

I live in Brick Towers, a public housing project in Newark's Central Ward. I moved in when the projects were privately owned by a man who the residents and I believed was a grade A slumlord.

- Cory Booker

We must be agents of love.

- Cory Booker

I thought that Donald Trump's ascendancy would end when he attacked John McCain, saying he's not a war hero. I found that shocking, for him to say that.

- Cory Booker

It defies logic that protections against predatory debt collection practices don't apply to debt collectors hired by the federal government.

- Cory Booker

I'm going to have setbacks and failures; I'm not going to see change right away all of the time or most of the time. But everybody I've ever respected has failed at one thing or another. I've definitely fallen on my face. But I've also had a comparatively easy life.

- Cory Booker

Every sector of society looks at digital analytics in a productive way. Limiting my ability to use them is just unacceptable. And by the way, Congress conducts polls using traditional methods. No one is using social media analytics as a substitute for that.

- Cory Booker

When we embraced social media, we took more control of the Newark narrative. We increased responsiveness toward residents. We drew more of our constituents in to participate in government and improve our cities.

- Cory Booker

If we cannot provide excellent educational opportunities to all children, safe communities, quality health coverage, or robust and fair avenues towards wealth creation, then our nation will increasingly be in peril.

- Cory Booker

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.

- Cory Booker

If we invest in ourselves, the collective good, we all thrive.

- Cory Booker

I'm a person that's grounded in faith and believe that my core values, motivation, inspiration, draw from a conception of the world in that way.

- Cory Booker

Life's too short not to try different things and to see what works for you and your body.

- Cory Booker

These are the themes in life which are consistent in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism - of being grounded in who you are and being engaged in an unjust world.

- Cory Booker

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

- Cory Booker

I don't want to be a race-transcending leader. I want to be deeply understood as a man, as African- American, as a Christian, all that I am.

- Cory Booker

I've been wrong on everything about Trump; I've been wrong about everything on the Republican side of the ledger. But allow me - with that caveat - to made the prediction that Donald Trump will not be the president of the United States. It just will not happen.

- Cory Booker

The issues we hear Donald Trump talking about are just so contrary to who we are as a people. They are an affront and an insult to our higher angels and our best selves.

- Cory Booker

We have Donald Trump standing up as one of the greatest fear-mongers in this nation's history. He's trying to make us afraid of each other.

- Cory Booker

It's not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.

- Cory Booker

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, full-contact, participatory endeavor.

- Cory Booker

I'd gladly take a grenade, if it meant saving Newark.

- Cory Booker

This world has a way of trying to homogenize you. Trying to sanitize you. Trying to scrub you of your unique divine genius. This world wants to make you regular.

- Cory Booker

I believe there's tremendous value in having a Supreme Court with a diverse set of experiences - especially when we're dealing with issues that range from our intimate relationships to how we finance campaigns.

- Cory Booker

I want to try to live my own values as consciously and purposefully as I can. Being vegan for me is a cleaner way of not participating in practices that don't align with my values.

- Cory Booker

Being vegan for me is a cleaner way of not participating in practices that don't align with my values.

- Cory Booker

'Hamilton' is one of the best things I've ever seen on a stage, and for a guy who loves American history, hip-hop and theater, it was pure bliss.

- Cory Booker

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

- Cory Booker

My family is no different from yours. We may be different from the geography that we come from. Some of you all may pray differently than I do, some of you all may be from a different ethnicity, but we all have the same story.

- Cory Booker

Equal protection under the law - for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation - should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day.

- Cory Booker

I just know that I'm innovative. I'm a quick thinker... In Washington, I just want to be a senator who finds a way to drive change and not figure out a way to conform.

- Cory Booker

I don't know what the strategy will be in Washington. The reality is, is, I have got to go down there, as my mentor, as people like Bill Bradley have told me to do, get to know your colleagues on both sides of the aisle, recognize that they, too, beat with the same heart and the same type of blood.

- 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.

- Cory Booker

My weakness in life is two men who seduce me all the time - named Ben & Jerry.

- Cory Booker

I believe that living life with a definiteness of purpose, with having a central focus, is essential to success.

- Cory Booker

As a vegetarian eating a plateful of eggs, I found myself in this weird place where I didn't want to think about where those eggs came from. I didn't want to think about the treatment of the animals who produced those eggs. When I find myself trying not to think about things, it seems to me that I'm practicing avoidance.

- Cory Booker

We should be ashamed of ourselves. We inherited the best infrastructure on the globe from our grandparents... and we've taken that inheritance and squandered it.

- Cory Booker

The gay people with whom I am close are some of the strongest, most passionate and caring people I know, and their demands for justice are no less imperative than those of any other community.

- Cory Booker

Elections have consequences. So many people want to complain, but they don't want to vote. We can talk about Hillary Clinton. We can celebrate her; we can support her, but if we don't come out and vote for her, for shame.

- Cory Booker

Government has got to open up and engage citizenry as partners.

- Cory Booker

I'm very knowledgeable of the challenges before me.

- Cory Booker

We are all innovators, we all like to use our imagination, which is our greatest tool.

- Cory Booker

You can be like a thermometer, just reflecting the world around you. Or you can be a thermostat, one of those people who sets the temperature.

- Cory Booker

My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the '60s, at a time of incredible activism.

- Cory Booker

We're heading towards a perception tipping point where it's going to soon become a foregone conclusion that not only has Newark turned a corner, but it's way down the right road.

- Cory Booker

My grandmother from Iowa, she is dancing in Heaven at the prospect that the next president of the United States is going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.

- Cory Booker

Newark faces real challenges.

- Cory Booker

I love seeing on Twitter when someone says I'm gay, and I say, 'So what does it matter if I am? So be it. I hope you are not voting for me because you are making the presumption that I'm straight.'

- Cory Booker

As a guy that had been told to drop out many times as I was coming up, I don't think you should tell any candidate about what they should do and what decisions they should make.

- Cory Booker

This November, with the re-election of President Barack Obama, this generation of Americans will ever expand upon the hope, the truth and the promise of America.

- Cory Booker

As I review the great history of our nation, community organizers have been at the center of so many of our great social movements.

- Cory Booker

We're all tired of a Washington that has these partisan camps where nothing gets done.

- Cory Booker

In life, you get one choice over and over again. That is to take conditions as they are or take responsibility for changing them.

- Cory Booker

You are more beautiful than you realize, stronger than you know, more powerful than you could imagine.

- Cory Booker

Let's not judge. Let's draw inspiration from each other's stories - successes and failures - and realize we're all connected.

- Cory Booker

What most Americans don't realize is a lot of the challenges we're struggling with today are the result of conscious housing policies.

- Cory Booker

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

- Cory Booker

The beauty of having your ego checked as many times as my ego was checked in Newark made me recognize how much I needed other people who were very different than me in order to get big things done.

- Cory Booker

If we are going to do big things in our country, we're going to have to think about better ways working across our differences.

- Cory Booker

I have seen too many of my male friends - no matter whether they're on the football field or inside a church - bash gays and then revel in their machismo or piety.

- Cory Booker

Americans, at our best, stand up to bullies and fight those who seek to demean and degrade others.

- Cory Booker

I wrote down the grades I wanted in every class.

- Cory Booker

I was raised in a very religious home with two parents who were deeply involved in the black church. When I was young, I went to a small black AME church in New Jersey.

- Cory Booker

We've got to be entrepreneurial; we've got to be innovative, and we've got to figure out ways of getting things done that people might think are very unorthodox.

- Cory Booker

People who get comfortable in their spirit miss what they were created for. They were created to magnify the glory of the world.

- Cory Booker

Generations of heroic Americans have made America more inclusive, more expansive, and more just.

- Cory Booker

Listen, don't get my Jersey pride going. We are the most densely-populated state in America 'cause some many people who know the secret want to live there.

- Cory Booker

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.

- Cory Booker

It's incredibly flattering to be a U.S. senator, which I want to stay at for a long time.

- Cory Booker

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

- Cory Booker

When I was just a twenty-something, I came to Newark, and I found a connection to the city in a spiritual way. I found a connection here and people here that reminded me so much of my roots and my own family.

- Cory Booker

I learned about community organizing from my parents. As a child, their stories were so instructive.

- Cory Booker

What we need to do is understand that we have to love each other, that we have to see each other have worth and dignity and value.

- Cory Booker

The drug war has been a war where the direct casualties have primarily been America's poor; America's minorities; and often, unfortunately, America's vulnerable, in terms of people with disease and addiction and mental health.

- Cory Booker

Having people that really reflect the spectrum of American experiences is important to have on the Supreme Court.

- Cory Booker

The change we seek for our nation is not the choice of an individual but must be the calling of a country.

- Cory Booker

The greatest natural resource our country has is not oil. It's not gas. It's not coal. It's the genius of our children.

- Cory Booker

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.

- Cory Booker

When American citizens pull together, there is little we can't accomplish.

- Cory Booker

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

- Cory Booker

If we're concerned about climate change as a country, we should have policies that make sure our great-grandchildren have a planet that's healthy and strong.

- Cory Booker

You were not built for comfort and convenience. You were built to overcome.

- Cory Booker

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

- Cory Booker

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

- Cory Booker

One of the very hallmarks of our nation is the ideal of E Pluribus Unum. It is a concept that richly flows from the highest ideals of our nation.

- Cory Booker

The mayoral mentality is incredibly valuable. I don't want to lose that.

- Cory Booker

We have had in our nation a well-celebrated Declaration of Independence. But our success as a country will depend upon a new 'Declaration of Inter-dependence.' A belief in how much we need each other, how much we share one common destiny.

- Cory Booker

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

- Cory Booker

The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.

- Cory Booker

I have not settled down with a life partner.

- Cory Booker

Marriage equality is not a choice. It is a legal right.

- Cory Booker

We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city.

- Cory Booker

I think Newark has been in the crosshairs in every generation of the fight to achieve America. And I think Newark is a city that's at that crossroads still.

- Cory Booker

I live in Newark. My family lives in Newark. I own a house in Newark.

- Cory Booker

Our platform is crafted by Democrats but it is not about partisanship, its about pragmatism.

- Cory Booker

So many great movements didn't succeed the first time, but people kept trying and trying and trying.

- Cory Booker

You don't have to be one of those people that accepts things as they are. Every day, take responsibility for changing them right where you are.

- Cory Booker

Don't give in to cynicism. It is a toxic spiritual state.

- Cory Booker

My whole life has been about confronting cynicism.

- Cory Booker

In America, our differences matter, but our country matters more. That's the attitude I wanted to take to the Senate.

- Cory Booker

When I do my hiring in the United States Senate, I look at issues of diversity.

- Cory Booker

Stand in a way that you are always empowering people to join in, because the only way to be truly successful is not to succeed as an individual, but to succeed as a part of a community, of a country.

- Cory Booker

Innovators reimagine our world in so many areas. We need them to help reimagine what government can and should be.

- Cory Booker

I don't know what God has planned for me or you or anyone, but I do know that in darkness, you discover an indistinguishable light.

- Cory Booker

I come from a mother who can cry at a G.E. commercial.

- Cory Booker

It takes too much energy to hate.

- Cory Booker

I spent eight years living without heat and hot water.

- Cory Booker

My parents were obsessed with my education.

- Cory Booker

We're not called to be a tolerant nation. We're called to be a nation of love.

- Cory Booker

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

- Cory Booker

We're a nation of hope, of high ideals.

- Cory Booker

Minorities do not believe this country will give them a fair shake.

- Cory Booker

I have got the job of my dreams.

- Cory Booker

I want to try to live my own values as consciously and purposefully as I can.

- Cory Booker

More than anything, we must do better for our children's education.

- Cory Booker