Ben Sasse Quotes

I think we are doing a bad job of helping our kids understand that they have huge resiliency.

It doesn’t matter whether the challenge we face is large or small, whether it’s a statewide disaster or a crisis just on our own block – Nebraskans face it with courage, goodwill, and the unwavering conviction that we are part of one community of neighbors and friends.

Well, I think it’s clear that the climate is changing. I think reasonable people can differ about how much and how rapidly. But I think it’s clear that it’s changing and it’s clear that humans are a contributing factor.

I don’t trust that the big-business part of our coalition is ever going to defend federalism and argue against regulatory capture. I don’t trust that populists are going to defend religious liberty and the rights of creedal minorities.

Courts do not make the law.

We must repeal Obamacare, but even more, we must replace the worldview that underlies and enabled it.

At our house we have come to conclude that building and strengthening character will require extreme measures and the intentional pursuit of gritty work experiences.

The word deepfake has become a generic noun for the use of machine-learning algorithms and facial-mapping technology to digitally manipulate people’s voices, bodies and faces. And the technology is increasingly so realistic that the deepfakes are almost impossible to detect.

Members of the Supreme Court have lifetime tenures because they’re not supposed to do politics.

The American work ethic is, thankfully, still deeply engraved in rural Nebraska souls. This is who we are, and we here in Nebraska have far more to teach Washington, D.C. than Washington, D.C. has to teach us.

Few experiences help our kids discover the distinction between needs and wants like the great outdoors.

A family‘s desire to be able to keep its health insurance when changing jobs or geography (a problem that Obamacare doesn’t make any better, by the way) is perfectly reasonable.

Subsidies and bailouts cannot compensate for uncertain or permanently diminished market access.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

Politics is about maintaining a framework for ordered liberty so that people can live in the neighborhoods and the communities that they live in.

Politics matter, but politics can’t come first. If politics come first in your life, something is wrong with you. It’s a sad thing.

Living in a republic demands a great deal of us.

My average duration in a job is more like six months, because I’ve done crisis and turnaround stuff for two decades. I’ve been in a lot of companies and not-for-profits and institutions that were really on fire; in a lot of ways, the Senate is the least urgent, least serious institution I’ve ever worked in.

It is good for kids to learn how to work.

Abortion is emotional and difficult to discuss.

Democrats have bad ideas and Republicans have no ideas.

The NBA has prided itself on free expression. Its players and owners have a well-earned reputation for speaking out on social justice in the United States. Sadly, it seems woke capitalism stops at the water‘s edge.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not pledge their fortunes and sacred honor so the federal government could play ‘helicopter parent‘ to a free people. They saw government as our shared project to secure liberty, doing a few big things and doing them well.

When I was a kid, we had airconditioning in the house… but we never used it.

Obamacare arrived also because Republicans failed to persuade the public that we could address the avalanche of problems government had already created by decades of interfering with the health-care market.

If you’re not ten minutes early where I’m from, my dad chews you out.

The people I like most are the people who are principled enough on both the right and the left to believe it is their duty to advocate, even though they may lose, and are not committed to their incumbency over the future of America.

Modern technology gives us surprising glimpses into human development. It helps us plan for and celebrate new life.

Government never adapts quickly to new challenges, but our slow-footedness on cyber is unparalleled.

An institution of higher education is a partnership among students and alumni, faculty and administrators, donors and trustees, neighborhoods and more, to build a community – and a culture.

Among the responsibilities of each citizen in a participatory democracy is keeping ourselves sufficiently informed so that we can participate effectively, argue our positions honorably, and hopefully, forge sufficient consensus to understand each other and then to govern.

Keeping our agricultural sector strong and secure should be a bipartisan concern.

If the Republican party becomes the party of David Duke, Donald Trump, I’m out.

Republicans must sell a big-cause, problem-solving vision – low-ego and happy-warrior in tone.

Since arriving in Washington in January 2015, I have pushed for a strategic framework that clearly articulates how we’ll tackle threats in cyberspace.

I’m often asked by search committees for public and private universities to help them think about how to find their next president.

Deepfakes – seemingly authentic video or audio recordings that can spread like wildfire online – are likely to send American politics into a tailspin, and Washington isn’t paying nearly enough attention to the very real danger that’s right around the corner.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

We cannot let Obamacare expand geographically by setting up state exchanges, nor can we extend Obamacare’s unlawful subsidies.

Martin Luther would be the headliner of any ‘dead-or-alive dinner party‘ I would ever throw. He is, quite simply, one of the most fascinating brains and compelling personalities in history.

There’s no Democratic and Republican seats or gyms or coffee shops at the Supreme Court. Every American should be able to celebrate the fact that we aspire to nine justices who are looking to defend our rights and to defend the Constitution, not to advance policy preferences.

The #MeToo movement doesn’t belong to Republicans or the Democrats. The #MeToo movement belongs to women who are having the courage to come forward and say this is wrong. People should be protected. We want that for all of our daughters and all of our sisters. We also want there to be rights for the accused.

Obamacare cannot be fixed and Republicans must not extend this disastrous legislation.

Obamacare has eliminated choices for millions of families, suffocated patient-centered medical innovation, and moved the United States closer to European-style centralized planning.

The USMCA is a good deal for American agriculture.

Some of the United States’ enemies now assume, perhaps rightly, that we hate each other so much that we’d sooner collaborate with them than do the difficult work of listening to each other. It doesn’t need to be this way – but national recovery won‘t come from Washington. It has to start with you.

We must energetically tackle the significant problems the voters rightly want Washington to be addressing.

We must not extend nor expand Obamacare. We need a completely different solution to help those caught in the Obamacare snare.

I’m from a farm town that when I was a kid was about an hour outside of Omaha.