Quotes About Robert Byrd

#1. My mom's voice filtered through my thoughts as I stopped in front of the Robert Byrd Science Building, out of the breath from racing up the steepest, most inconvenient hill in history.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#2. If the voters really understood what we were up to they'd vote us out of office.

Robert Byrd

#3. One's family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I'll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who'll be with me will be my family.

Robert Byrd

#4. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter] that he would have been a great senator at any moment ... He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation.

Christopher Dodd

#5. I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

Robert Byrd

#6. It was the separation of powers upon which the framers placed their hopes for the preservation of the people's liberties. Despite this heritage, the congress has been in too many cases more than willing to walk away from its constitutional powers.

Robert Byrd

#7. Congress is not an ATM.

Robert Byrd

#8. Bill Clinton was doing Ku Klux Klan grand kleagel jokes at Byrd's funeral, saying, Oh, Robert C. Byrd, he used the - he was the grand kleagel. He just did what he had to do.

Sean Hannity

#9. To the American people I say, awaken to what is happening. It is the duty of each citizen to be vigilant, to protect liberty, to speak out, left and right and disagree lest be trampled underfoot by misguided zealotry and extreme partisanship.

Robert Byrd

#10. Saddam Hussein is a threat, but the threat is not so great that we must be stampeded to provide such authority to this president just weeks before an election.

Robert Byrd

#11. Our ideals of freedom, set forth and realized in our Constitution, are our greatest export to the world.

Robert Byrd

#12. Mission accomplished? The mission in Iraq, as laid out by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, has failed.

Robert Byrd

#13. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

Robert Byrd

#14. To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

Robert Byrd

#15. I have never seen such extreme partisanship, such bitter partisanship, and such forgetfulness of the fate of our fathers and of the Constitution.

Robert Byrd

#16. Is it any wonder, why the approval ratings of the Congress go up every time we go into recess?

Robert Byrd

#17. Can it be that we, too, are ready to embrace the foul concepts of atheism? Somebody is tampering with America's soul, I leave it to you who that somebody is.

Robert Byrd

#18. America's true power lies not in its will to dominate but in its ability to inspire.

Robert Byrd

#19. The money the president wants to borrow for Iraq will come directly out of the American taxpayer wallets in the form of Medicare and Social Security receipts. That's your money.

Robert Byrd

#20. That's what the Senate is about. It's the last bastion of minority rights, where a minority can be heard, where a minority can stand on its feet, one individual if necessary, and speak until he falls into the dust.

Robert Byrd

#21. And the president is all wrong when he maintains that a nominee should have an up-or-down vote. The Constitution doesn't say that. The Constitution doesn't say that that nominee shall have any vote at all. There doesn't have to even be a vote.

Robert Byrd

#22. I am a former Kleagle [recruiter] of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County. The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union.

Robert Byrd

#23. It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people's liberties that is in jeopardy. That is why I wrote 'Losing America.'

Robert Byrd

#24. The ongoing strife in Iraq, and the billions of dollars that the President is seeking to continue that war, give me little comfort that this Administration has learned from its mistakes in Iraq.

Robert Byrd

#25. Do not run a campaign that would embarrass your mother.

Robert Byrd

#26. I have been in Congress for more than a half century. I have lived through times of fear and times of hope. Of despair and of achievement. I have seen our government at its best, but today I fear that we see our government at its worst.

Robert Byrd

#27. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends.

Robert Byrd

#28. Political correctness gets in the way of all too many things in this country of ours, I am not a subscriber of political correctness by any means, shape or form.

Robert Byrd

#29. Be sure you avoid the Ku Klux Klan. Don't get that albatross around your neck. Once you've made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena.

Robert Byrd

#30. It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics.

Robert Byrd

#31. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of Sept. 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who masterminded the Sept. 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein, who did not.

Robert Byrd

#32. This war is not necessary. We are truly sleepwalking through history.

Robert Byrd