Top 66 Ben Sasse Quotes

The Chinese Communist Party and the American people are locked in conflict.

Obamacare has eliminated choices for millions of families, suffocated patient-centered medical innovation, and moved the United States closer to European-style centralized planning.

The health of our republic depends on shared principles like the First Amendment, but it is also built on the Teddy Roosevelt-like vigor of its citizens and local self-reliance.

We must repeal Obamacare, but even more, we must replace the worldview that underlies and enabled it.

Abortion is emotional and difficult to discuss.

I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net.

Persevering and getting through hardship makes you tough, and at our house we celebrate stitches. As long as we didn’t do permanent damage to their spine that’s going to have lasting effect, we applaud and celebrate stitches at our house.

It doesn’t matter whether the challenge we face is large or small, whether it’s a statewide disaster or a crisis just on our own block – Nebraskans face it with courage, goodwill, and the unwavering conviction that we are part of one community of neighbors and friends.

I don’t trust that the big-business part of our coalition is ever going to defend federalism and argue against regulatory capture. I don’t trust that populists are going to defend religious liberty and the rights of creedal minorities.

I read articles in the gym in the morning on a tablet or phone. Then I print out a stack of them that I carry around with me throughout the workday.

Obamacare arrived also because Republicans failed to persuade the public that we could address the avalanche of problems government had already created by decades of interfering with the health-care market.

Before becoming a college president, I helped over a dozen organizations find strategies to get through some very ugly crises.

A family‘s desire to be able to keep its health insurance when changing jobs or geography (a problem that Obamacare doesn’t make any better, by the way) is perfectly reasonable.

Since arriving in Washington in January 2015, I have pushed for a strategic framework that clearly articulates how we’ll tackle threats in cyberspace.

Few experiences help our kids discover the distinction between needs and wants like the great outdoors.

Obamacare is a big deal to me. It’s terrible legislation.

The people I like most are the people who are principled enough on both the right and the left to believe it is their duty to advocate, even though they may lose, and are not committed to their incumbency over the future of America.

There were giant scale barriers to becoming a nuclear power, whereas launching a cyberattack requires only some coding capability, a laptop and an Internet connection.

The USMCA is a good deal for American agriculture.

Congress is where Americans are supposed to have our big, messy political fights. That’s because the people who make the laws need to be hired and fired by the people. Don’t like the laws? Fire the lawmakers.

I’m a right-wing conservative.

I didn’t go to Harvard because I thought they had good academics. I went because they had crappy enough sports so they’d let me play.

Rising political tribalism, shamelessly exaggerating our opponents‘ claims or behavior, is leaving us vulnerable: No one loves America’s internal fighting – and our increasingly siloed news consumption – more than Vladimir Putin.

Well, I think it’s clear that the climate is changing. I think reasonable people can differ about how much and how rapidly. But I think it’s clear that it’s changing and it’s clear that humans are a contributing factor.

I think we should have a universal, a shared cultural or societal goal, of universal health insurance coverage. That’s completely different from saying the government can solve all of those problems, or that it can micromanage every aspect of the health delivery system. I think we know that it can’t do that.

At our house we have come to conclude that building and strengthening character will require extreme measures and the intentional pursuit of gritty work experiences.

For a Nebraska kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nebraska football was a quasi-religion, so I ran out to get The Omaha World-Herald every morning, salivating for the sports page. My dad, however, required that I read one front page story and one editorial before I was allowed to turn to the sports.

My wife, Melissa, and I, together with our neighbors, try to create experiences for our kids that build character. We want our kids to exercise their muscles and their minds.

I’m often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

Democrats have bad ideas and Republicans have no ideas.

I don’t think that our Founders would believe that America could long prosper if the people were not readers.

I believe zealously in conservative ideals, but Nebraskans want people who get things done, not just those who scream at each other.

Every day, across our state, we see grit and resilience.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

Most healthy people want to coach Little League, they want to go to church and they want to have great coworkers at the office and they want to put on faceplate when Nebraska’s point football on Saturdays. That’s the most natural way to live.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

I do worry that we’re failing in a whole bunch of fundamental ways to distinguish for our kids between needs and wants. And we’re failing to distinguish between production and consumption.

From the first-year students‘ fall orientation to the board‘s annual budget-approval meeting, everything a healthy college does requires a shared sense of mission.

Obamacare cannot be fixed and Republicans must not extend this disastrous legislation.

The nature and scope of security threats in the cyber era are four-dimensional compared to the early nuclear age.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not pledge their fortunes and sacred honor so the federal government could play ‘helicopter parent‘ to a free people. They saw government as our shared project to secure liberty, doing a few big things and doing them well.

Politics matter, but politics can’t come first. If politics come first in your life, something is wrong with you. It’s a sad thing.

Subsidies and bailouts cannot compensate for uncertain or permanently diminished market access.

Obamacare is not popular.

If you’re not ten minutes early where I’m from, my dad chews you out.

Farmers and ranchers need long-term certainty about who they will be able to sell to and under what terms.

The American work ethic is, thankfully, still deeply engraved in rural Nebraska souls. This is who we are, and we here in Nebraska have far more to teach Washington, D.C. than Washington, D.C. has to teach us.

Work gives you meaning. Work turns you into a servant to your family and to your neighbors and to your local community.

My grandma was a child of the Depression, and knew the tragedy of having her home outside Diller was destroyed by a tornado.

Nebraska Republicans believe that Nebraska Democrats love their kids, and I believe we can have a constructive conversation with everybody.

We lack an educated, resilient citizenry capable of navigating the increasing complexities of daily life.

I’m from a farm town that when I was a kid was about an hour outside of Omaha.

An institution of higher education is a partnership among students and alumni, faculty and administrators, donors and trustees, neighborhoods and more, to build a community – and a culture.

When I was a kid, we had airconditioning in the house… but we never used it.

I’m a politician who has to for a time serve in public life, and I get death threats. And it is what it is because you’ve put yourself out there in the public square.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

The #MeToo movement is a very important movement. It’s messy. And it’s complicated. And there are places where it’s going to overreach.

We must energetically tackle the significant problems the voters rightly want Washington to be addressing.

The #MeToo movement doesn’t belong to Republicans or the Democrats. The #MeToo movement belongs to women who are having the courage to come forward and say this is wrong. People should be protected. We want that for all of our daughters and all of our sisters. We also want there to be rights for the accused.

Members of the Supreme Court have lifetime tenures because they’re not supposed to do politics.

The word deepfake has become a generic noun for the use of machine-learning algorithms and facial-mapping technology to digitally manipulate people’s voices, bodies and faces. And the technology is increasingly so realistic that the deepfakes are almost impossible to detect.

Some of the United States‘ enemies now assume, perhaps rightly, that we hate each other so much that we’d sooner collaborate with them than do the difficult work of listening to each other. It doesn’t need to be this way – but national recovery won‘t come from Washington. It has to start with you.

Politics is about maintaining a framework for ordered liberty so that people can live in the neighborhoods and the communities that they live in.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history – not only because it isn’t true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically – that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.

It is good for kids to learn how to work.