Quotes from Al Franken

When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building, I didn't realize he meant our nation.

I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.

They tell you in this country that you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And we all believe that. But first you've got to have the boots. And the federal government gave Franni's family the boots.

The problem with Ted isn't that he's humorless. It isn't even his truly reprehensible far-right politics. No, the problem with Ted—and the reason so many senators have a problem with Ted—is simply that he is an absolutely toxic coworker. He's the guy in your office who snitches to corporate about your March Madness pool and microwaves fish in the office kitchen. He is the Dwight Schrute of the Senate. In

Virtually everyone in the world believes that climate change is real and is caused by human beings, except Republicans in the United States. Especially the people who would know best: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by human activity, and I suspect the other 3 percent are being paid by the fossil fuel industry".

But I really think that if we don't start caring about whether people tell the truth or not, it's going to be literally impossible to restore anything approaching a reasonable political discourse. Politicians have always shaded the truth. But if you can say something that is provably false, and no one cares, then you can't have a real debate about anything. I

It was almost as if the incoming commander-in-chief had some sort of mental health problem. The kind of mental health problem that you would be disturbed to discover in your kid's piano teacher, let alone the president of the United States of America

But now we seem to have entered an era where getting caught lying openly and shamelessly, lying in a manner that insults the intelligence of both your friends and foes, lying about lying, and lying for the sake of lying have all lost their power to damage a politician. In fact, the "Trump Effect" yields the opposite result: Trump supporters seem to approve of the fact that he lies constantly, including to them.

I don't know why dishonesty has always gotten under my skin. My parents taught me to tell the truth, but come on, whose parents didn't? Well, okay, maybe Trump's. The point is, I don't know where exactly my particular obsession with lies and lying liars came from. And I admit, it's a little weird. Part of it may be that I've always been an incredibly literal person.

In the foreseeable future, I will be a dead person. I want to remind you that dead people are people too. There are good dead people and bad dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people. Dead people have fought in every war." Then

My point is, the Senate is filled not just with lawyers, but with old white men.

I know I'm sort of farting into the wind on this. But I hope you'll fart along with me. I've always believed that it's possible to discern true statements from false statements, and that it's critically important to do so, and that we put our entire democratic experiment in peril when we don't. It's a lesson I fear our nation is about to learn the hard way. That's

The Democratic Senator's Serenity Prayer God Grant Me the Serenity to Accept the Things I Cannot Legislate The Courage to Legislate the Things I Can The Wisdom to Know the Difference And the Patience to Explain That Difference to My Donors

I watched Harry closely as he read the joke and then… burst out laughing. In fact, he started shaking with laughter. It was a surreal moment, sitting nervously with my consultants, watching Harry Reid convulse in hysterics over the idea of Anne Frank playing drums in the attic. Finally, he turned to me. I just shrugged.

That's how things are supposed to work. If you are privileged enough to have a job as a lawmaker, part of your job is to make laws. And if you don't like the way a law is working, your job is to help make it work better. But

Virtually everyone in the world believes that climate change is real and is caused by human beings, except Republicans in the United States.

I'm not going to write stuff like, "Mitch McConnell and I may disagree, but when we're off the clock, we're the best of friends—sometimes we go to dinner and Mitch will laugh so hard that milk shoots out of his nose." No, I'm not going to be writing clichés like that. Instead

Former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank once said, "I only voted once for someone who believes in 100 percent of what I believe. And that's when I voted for myself—the first time.

Campaign contributions don't buy votes. What they buy is access.

Today's Congress is a polarized, dysfunctional body, rendered helpless by partisanship, more focused on scoring short-term political points than on solving our nation's urgent problems. In short, the Washington of the past decade has been awash in nincompoopery.USS* And that was before Trump.

Anyway, here's the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz. I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.

The point is that there is tremendous hypocrisy among the Christian right. And I think that Christian voters should start looking at global warming and extreme poverty as a religious issue that speaks to the culture of life.

There's an appeal to the American sense of exceptionalism, that we're morally superior, as way to not be self-critical. I think that's a bit dangerous.

In my first week as a U.S. senator, I had the privilege of participating in the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Sonia Sotomayor.