Quotes

On Bush's war in Iraq - "He did it in the worst possible way - without the United Nations, without our allies and without a plan to win the peace."

It's full speed ahead, and we're not playing cautious here. I'm going to take the fight to George Bush. We must take nothing for granted, but in November we will beat George W. Bush.

If the American people give me a shot at George Bush next November, I will give them back the White House.

I am John Kerry and I am reporting for duty.

"I think 9/11 was the predominant overriding element. And I think that in the end, an awful lot of people were unwilling to switch commander-in-chief in midstream. And it just came down to, sort of, that perception." (Imus in the Morning, February 7, 2005 - on why he believes he lost the 2004 presidential election)

I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.

We should not go to war because these things are in his past, but we should be prepared to go to war because of what they tell us about the future.

I have said publicly for years that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein pose a real and grave threat to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region. Saddam Hussein's record bears this out.

It is clear that in the four years since the UNSCOM inspectors were forced out, Saddam Hussein has continued his quest for weapons of mass destruction.

Regime change has been an American policy under the Clinton administration, and it is the current policy. I support the policy.

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq. Campaign speech, October 30, 2006.

In America, you have the right to be stupid.

[on chemical weapons use in Syria in 2013] Anyone who could claim that an attack of this staggering scale could be contrived or fabricated needs to check their conscience and their own moral compass.

[dismissing the views of climate-change skeptics, 2014] We don't have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society.

We need a new plan for investing in the 21st century - one that starts by recognizing the reality that no one government in the world has the ability to move fast enough. Americans can't opt out of a networked world. To success, all of us have to opt in.

[observation, June 2017] This is not a normal time. It is not normal to see a President of the United States decrying "so-called judges". It is not normal for the leader of the country that invented what is our First Ammendment to degrade and even threaten journalists. And it is not normal to see the head of the FBI fired summarily because he was investigating connections between Russia and the presidential campaign of the very man who fired him. No, there is nothing normal about this moment, and there is nothing normal American about it, either.

If our institutions can't build consensus and respond to the demand of Americans for jobs today, how will we ever do it in a time when artificial intelligence and robotics kick in and exponentially more jobs disappear - twice as fast?

We've spent more time debating what to call extremism than we have discussing a long-term strategy for defeating it. If we don't wrestle with the long term, every four years a different President and a different Foreign Minister will face a different terrorist group with a different acronym.

Our gridlock and willful denial are even more dangerous and and economically costly in the fight to correct the perilous course our planet has been on for far too long. Make no mistake: if the United States retreats from our commitments in the Paris Agreement, it will have enormous negative reverberations around the equator and from pole to pole...The question right now isn't whether we will get to the global, low-carbon economy that we need. We will. The question is whether we're going to do it fast enough to prevent the worst of what the changing climate could inflict on every corner of the world.

I didn't really want to get involved in the war. When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing.

[on the killing of Osama Bin Laden] This closes an important chapter in our war against extremists who kill innocent people around the world. We are a nation of peace and laws, and people everywhere should understand that our 10-year manhunt was in search of justice, not revenge.