I don't think that our Founders would believe that America could long prosper if the people were not readers.
— Ben Sasse
American elections should be for Americans. And the idea that we would have foreign nation-states coming into the American electoral process, or the information surrounding an election, is really, really bad.
Obviously, we shouldn't be having any American officeholder or any American candidate looking for foreign nations to come in and be involved in U.S. elections.
We have judges in the American system and they take on a black robe where they are supposed to shield their partisan preferences. They are not red or blue state judges. They are judges.
Work gives you meaning. Work turns you into a servant to your family and to your neighbors and to your local community.
It is good for kids to learn how to work.
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.
Martin Luther would be the headliner of any 'dead-or-alive dinner party' I would ever throw. He is, quite simply, one of the most fascinating brains and compelling personalities in history.
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.
You know, my Uber driver rating is 10,000. People tell me it's the best rating. It's fantastic, believe me.
Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.
The Chinese Communist Party and the American people are locked in conflict.
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.
Few experiences help our kids discover the distinction between needs and wants like the great outdoors.
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.
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.
Democrats have long held an advantage over Republicans on health care, mostly due to a perceived empathy problem in my party.
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.
If you're not ten minutes early where I'm from, my dad chews you out.
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.
Politics is about maintaining a framework for ordered liberty so that people can live in the neighborhoods and the communities that they live in.
I'm from a farm town that when I was a kid was about an hour outside of Omaha.
Being stuck in adolescence - that's a hell. 'Peter Pan' is a dystopia, and we forget that. Neverland is a bad place to be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We ought to have the courage of our convictions and confidence in our own ingenuity. After all, that's what America is all about. Either that, or learn Mandarin.
The NBA has prided itself on free expression. Its players and owners have a well-earned reputation for speaking out on social justice in the United States. Sadly, it seems woke capitalism stops at the water's edge.
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.
Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.
We lack an educated, resilient citizenry capable of navigating the increasing complexities of daily life.
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.
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.
If the Republican party becomes the party of David Duke, Donald Trump, I'm out.
There's no Democratic and Republican seats or gyms or coffee shops at the Supreme Court. Every American should be able to celebrate the fact that we aspire to nine justices who are looking to defend our rights and to defend the Constitution, not to advance policy preferences.
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.
The longest-term thought many people have in D.C. is how can I be sure I don't do anything that so annoys either my base or my general electorate that I might not be able to get my job back? I don't think that's the right way to think about it.
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.
I think we are doing a bad job of helping our kids understand that they have huge resiliency.
My life is too mundane for anyone to write up.
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.
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.
My average duration in a job is more like six months, because I've done crisis and turnaround stuff for two decades. I've been in a lot of companies and not-for-profits and institutions that were really on fire; in a lot of ways, the Senate is the least urgent, least serious institution I've ever worked in.
With a population of 1.4 billion, China is a lucrative market. But getting into that market isn't cheap. At best, the price of doing business in China is silence; at worst, it's reading talking points straight from the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing is not subtle about it.
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.
Deepfakes - seemingly authentic video or audio recordings that can spread like wildfire online - are likely to send American politics into a tailspin, and Washington isn't paying nearly enough attention to the very real danger that's right around the corner.
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.
When I was a kid, we had airconditioning in the house... but we never used it.
Obamacare is not popular.
