Joe Lieberman

I will not hesitate to tell my friends when I think they're wrong and to tell my opponents when I think they're right.

Joseph Isadore "Joe" Lieberman (February 24, 1942 – March 27, 2024) was an American politician from Connecticut. Lieberman was first elected to the United States Senate in 1988, and was elected to his fourth term on November 7, 2006. In the 2000 U.S. presidential election Lieberman was the Democratic candidate for Vice President, running alongside presidential nominee Al Gore, becoming the first Jewish candidate on a major American political party presidential ticket. Gore and Lieberman won the popular vote in the election, but lost in the Electoral College.

Quotes

• I was in Washington in the summer of 1963, [and] had the opportunity to participate in Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington, which culminated at the Lincoln memorial in his soaring 'I Have a Dream' speech. For me, this was America at its best. Hundreds of thousands of us, all religions, races, and nationalities, joined together peacefully but powerfully to petition our government to right the wrong of racial bigotry.
  • Lieberman, In Praise of Public Life, 34, 2000.

• We must rise above politics and restore independence to the White House, not compromise our economic or environmental or health security for political contributors or extreme ideologues … We must rise above partisan politics and stand up for our values here at home, because family and faith and responsibility matter more than power and partisanship and privilege. … I intend to talk straight to the American people and to show them that I'm a different kind of Democrat … I will not hesitate to tell my friends when I think they're wrong and to tell my opponents when I think they're right.
  • "Lieberman announces presidential bid", CNN (13 January 2003)

• I have consistently opposed a flag-burning amendment, and voted against its passage. Flag desecration is hateful and worthy of condemnation, and I would support any statory means possible to curtail desecration of the flag. But I believe that the importance of the Bill of Rights -- our nations founding document -- requires us to establish a very high threshold for agreeing to change it. does the amendment address some extreme threat to our country, or redress some outrageous wrong? In this case, abhorrent though flag desecration may be, it simply does not meet that test.
  • Associated Press policy Q&A, "Flag Amendment," Jan 25, 2004.

• The best thing we did with the Patriot Act was to sunset it. Almost 800 foreign nationals, immigrants, mostly Arab-Americans or people who looked like Arab-Americans, were arrested, put in jail, held without charges, no notification for their families and no right to counsel. That's un-American and I'll fight to end that. If we fight the terrorists who attacked us because of our liberties by compromising our liberties, shame on us.
  • CNN "Rock the Vote", Nov 5, 2003

• It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be commander-in-chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation's peril. [1]

• I urge the Bush Administration to rethink its priorities. We can't talk about community values without being prepared to invest in those very same communities.

• Shame on us if 100 or 200 years from now our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are living on a planet that has been irreparably damaged by global warming, and they ask, 'How could those who came before us, who saw this coming, have let this happen?' [2]

• I have great respect for Dick Cheney. I don't agree with a lot of things he said in this campaign. He was a very distinguished Secretary of Defense, and I don't have anything negative to say about him.
  • October 5, 2000 vice-presidential debate with Dick Cheney [3]

• There is also a magic in reading. Books have taken me to places I never thought I would visit, introduced me to people I never thought I would meet, and transported me to times past and futures imagined I never though I would experience.
  • In Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen (eds.) The Book That Changed My Life (2006), ISBN 1-592-40210-0, p. 104

Quotes about Joe Lieberman

• If you just look at the majority of American Jews, they are more like Bernie Sanders than Joe Lieberman, in terms of secular versus Orthodox, or non-nationalistic versus nationalistic, or moral versus corrupt. There are all these articles that keep coming, saying that Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about his Judaism enough, or contrasting him with Joe Lieberman as the American Jewish icon, because — because why? Because Lieberman wears a yarmulke? Because he lends his name to extremist movements, like Christians United for Israel? To me that’s not Judaism, and for the press and even the Jewish community to implicitly assume that these extremes are our norms — that is what is self-loathing, that is when we become self-hating.
  • Eli Valley Interview (2017)

• The last straw for me was Joe Lieberman. For years I've been voting for Democrats on the grounds that at least the party is not run by right-wing lunatics, but if you listen to Lieberman's rhetoric, he's a Christian rightist in Jewish drag...Both Gore and Lieberman are pandering to religious and moral conservatives, again ignoring the secularists and social liberals who are the backbone of the party. Neither of them ever met a civil liberty he liked. I am chilled by their demagogic attacks on popular culture.
  • Ellen Willis article (2000)