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
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.
I learned about community organizing from my parents. As a child, their stories were so instructive.
When American citizens pull together, there is little we can't accomplish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want to be myself. I want to be as authentic as possible.
Everybody wants to find their soul mate, and I'm no different. That's definitely what I want in the future.
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.
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.
You can't have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation.
I am a geek nerd who happened to have a temporary period of jockiness.
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.
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.
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.
The change we seek for our nation is not the choice of an individual but must be the calling of a country.
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.
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.
In America we have a Declaration of Independence, but our history, our advancements, our global strength all point to an American declaration of interdependence.
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.
My dad set a clear model for me for what manhood was all about.
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.
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.
I come from a mother who can cry at a G.E. commercial.
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.
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.
I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.
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.
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.
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.
Our platform emphasizes that a vibrant, free and fair market is essential to economic growth.
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.
As I review the great history of our nation, community organizers have been at the center of so many of our great social movements.
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.
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.
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.
I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 debated between law school and divinity.
I'd gladly take a grenade, if it meant saving Newark.
People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.
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.
