Chris Murphy Quotes

I have gone from a proponent of campaign finance reform to a revolutionary during my time in public service.

If you want to change our gun laws, the best thing you can do is find a group that speaks to you and get involved.

I do not understand how people can look at the rapid spread of extremism all across the globe and not understand that it is – that it isn’t coincidental to the concurrent rapid spread of a very conservative strain of Islam that is paid for out of Saudi Arabia.

If you were a Democrat getting ready to run for office in the 2000s, as I was, you were told to stay clear of guns… I really regret that. I regret having listened to that advice.

In Syria, a progressive foreign policy would have shown military restraint while pumping up our ability to gain political leverage over Syria’s benefactors and providing humanitarian funding to make sure that anybody that wanted to leave Syria could.

Terrorist groups are working and communicating across E.U. borders – our efforts to track those groups must do so as well.

I arrived in Hartford as a 25-year-old naive state legislator who believed in universal health care. I rose to become the 29-year-old Chairman of the legislature‘s Health Committee.

The American people didn’t send us to Congress to post our sympathies on social media. You can do that without going through the trouble of getting elected to Congress. This job is about setting rules that better protect us and our children.

One of the smartest investments we can make in Connecticut is in job training programs.

The most powerful force when changing people’s hearts and minds is a person-to-person conversation.

American values don’t begin and end with destroyers and aircraft carriers.

When I got to the Senate, I made overhauling our nation‘s mental health laws one of my top priorities.

What we do in Connecticut is ban assault weapons. We ban high-capacity magazines. We have true universal background checks, and we require everybody to get a permit from their police department before they can carry a pistol.

Rarely do political contributions lead to direct quid pro quo transactions – donations for votes – and those that cross this line normally get caught.

ISIL is a terrorist army like we have never seen – they cannot be ignored.

Russia’s number-one goal is to pull apart the E.U., to pull apart NATO.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. Frankly, I’d be shocked if they did.

There are numerous groups across the country, both local and national, that are working to prevent gun violence in our communities.

American values come by helping countries fight corruption to build stability. American values flow through tackling climate change and building energy independence. American values come through humanitarian assistance whereby we try to stop catastrophes from happening.

American foreign policy needs to be driven by what will get results and what is legal, not by what satisfies our primal instincts of revenge.

In 2013 and 2014, I traveled to Ukraine three times with Senator John McCain.

There is no doubt Assad deserves every missile we fire at him, but there’s one big problem with air strikes – there is absolutely no proof it has any deterrent effect on Assad. To the contrary, history tells us these strikes will most likely quicken the pace of his assault on his own people.

The political alliance between the House of Saud and the conservative Wahhabi clerics is as old as the nation, and the alliance has resulted in billions funneled to and through the Wahhabi movement.

Our mental health system is broken, and we should fix it.

You can just assume that better law enforcement response is going to quell the epidemic of gun violence in this country.

The list of erratic actions from Mohammed bin Salman is long: the jailing of royal family members, the detention of the Lebanese prime minister, a nonsensical feud with Qatar, the growing internal repression of political speech, and the disastrous war in Yemen.

I used to play lots of sports. I used to be a good tennis player. I used to be a decent golfer.

I served on the committee in the U.S. House that wrote the Affordable Care Act. I defended it back home in endless town halls. I got elected to the Senate, and when no one wanted to stand up for the ACA in its early days, I took up the cause, going to the Senate floor nearly every week to extol its virtues.

The more we remove the need for individual members of Congress to raise private election funds, the more our representatives can focus on the things they were elected to do, and the more time they will have to cross party lines and erase the divisions that pollute our national dialogue.

As lawmakers, our job is to listen to our constituents. If our phones are ringing off the hook with people demanding to know where we stand on an issue, we pay attention.

I’ve never met a Democrat in Congress who wants open borders or who doesn’t believe in enforcing immigration laws.

From the outside, Qatar and U.A.E. likely look like twins – small, oil-rich Sunni monarchies that are largely friendly to the U.S. But their philosophies on the region are very different – Qatar does not fear Islamism as does the U.A.E.

In Connecticut, we have passed some of the strongest anti-gun-violence laws in the nation. We don’t restrict anybody’s Second Amendment rights.

I can’t throw a nickel from the Capitol without hitting a think tank that’s been financed by one of the Gulf States.

You can only explain America’s gun violence problem through guns, because mental illness doesn’t automatically lead to violence, and it doesn’t lead to violence anywhere else but America.

One of my chief criticisms of U.S. international policy is that Congress has largely abdicated its foreign policy-making responsibilities to the executive branch.

Helping people get the skills they need to set them up for a rewarding career helps keep people in Connecticut, and it ensures that we have a workforce that’s ready to fill the thousands of manufacturing jobs of the future.

The United States has the best intelligence-gathering operation in the world. We should provide a greater level of training and assistance to the E.U. to help them develop a more robust counter-terrorism platform.

The tweets that I send out are not written by somebody else. They’re not vetted through my communications staff.

Whenever I travel abroad, I try to visit U.S. troops just to say thanks.

Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East – an addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn’t.

I can’t stand the idea of a veteran risking her or his life for this country, suffering the wounds of battle, and then being kicked to the curb as a result of those wounds. But that is exactly what has happened to tens of thousands of men & women who have fought and bled for our country.