Cory Booker Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Don't let your inability to do everything undermine your determination to do something.

Cory Booker

#4. The more you limit your choices, thereby limiting thought, the more you can simplify your life and focus your energy elsewhere.

Cory Booker

#5. 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

#6. You cannot find what you do not seek. You cannot grasp when you do not reach. Your dreams won't come up to your front door. You have got to take a leap if you want to soar.

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#8. Dream big & have huge ambition, but never forget life is lived in small moments and sustained by simple acts of love.

Cory Booker

#9. 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

#10. I wrote down the grades I wanted in every class.

Cory Booker

#11. 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

#12. I love talking about the challenges [Newark, NJ] has because of the way they are always brilliantly disguised as opportunities..the biggest global challenge that there is is a challenge of the spirit, a challenge of our vision, a challenge and a test of our ideals, of who we SAY we are GOING TO BE.

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Do not forget from whence you've come.

Cory Booker

#18. Never let your soul be silenced. Live life out loud. Every day tell your truth not with words but with actions from your heart.

Cory Booker

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Real courage is holding on to a still voice in your head that says, 'I must keep going.' It's that voice that says nothing is a failure if it is not final. That voice that says to you, 'Get out of bed. Keep going. I will not quit.'

Cory Booker

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Cory Booker

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. First class in life has nothing to do with the clothes you wear, the car you drive or the house you live in. First class is and always will be about the content of your character, the quality of your ideas and the kindness in your heart.

Cory Booker

#30. Give more than is expected, love more than seems wise, serve more than seems necessary, and help more than is asked.

Cory Booker

#31. 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

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

Cory Booker

#33. The world you see outside of you will always be a reflection of what you have inside of you.

Cory Booker

#34. I hope and understand that people are getting a better recognition that food stamps is a program that really helps America, helps families in need. It's not a government handout. If anything, it's a safety net that helps people through difficult times and bridges them towards stability.

Cory Booker

#35. The history in our country speaks to our highest values of people who did not accept things as they are and go along with them. They resisted, they refused to accept the world as it is, they demanded it to be a better reflection of their highest dreams and highest aspirations.

Cory Booker

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Cory Booker

#39. 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

#40. Before you tell me what you teach and preach, show me how you live and give.

Cory Booker

#41. 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

#42. 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

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

Cory Booker

#44. In life, it is never the big battle, the big moment, the big speech, the big election. That does not change things. What changes things is every day, getting up and rendering small acts of service and love beyond that what's expected of you or required of you.

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#46. 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

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

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. May we help more than we hurt, may we seek to understand more than be understood and may we love more than we judge.

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#53. 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

#54. Heroism is not fighting some big battle. It is not standing up to some fearsome foe ... Heroism is every day getting up with a mission to show this world that you are going to light it up with your spirit, to make the best out of yourself.

Cory Booker

#55. 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

#56. I have not settled down with a life partner.

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#59. Give the respect you want to receive; embody the grace you hope to encounter; and help others with no expectations whatsoever.

Cory Booker

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

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

Cory Booker

#64. 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

#65. I have got the job of my dreams.

Cory Booker

#66. 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

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

Cory Booker

#68. 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

#69. I am a Yale Law School graduate.

Cory Booker

#70. I'm very knowledgeable of the challenges before me.

Cory Booker

#71. 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

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

Cory Booker

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

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

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#79. We must be agents of love.

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#82. 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

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

Cory Booker

#84. 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

#85. It takes too much energy to hate.

Cory Booker

#86. What more could you ask for in life than to be given an impossible challenge?

Cory Booker

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

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

Cory Booker

#91. 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

#92. Go out there and swear to this world your oath, not with your words, but with what you do. Not with your hand over your heart, but with your hand outstretched to a world that desperately needs your hand, your help, your insights, your creativity, your honor, your courage. It needs you.

Cory Booker

#93. It is okay not to like someone, but it is never okay to try and degrade, humiliate, or dehumanize them.

Cory Booker

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

Cory Booker

#95. Leadership is not a position or a title, it is action and example.

Cory Booker

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people. Before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all His children.

Cory Booker

#99. If you want the things people don't have, you have to do the things other people will not do.

Cory Booker

#100. 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