Joe Biden Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

And now, together – on eagle's wings – we embark on the work that God and history have called upon us to do. With full hearts and steady hands, with faith in America and in each other, with a love of country – and a thirst for justice – let us be the nation that we know we can be. A nation united. A nation strengthened. A nation healed. The United States of America.

Joe Biden
We stand again at an inflection point. We have the opportunity to defeat despair and to build a nation of prosperity and purpose. We can do it. I know we can. I've long talked about the battle for the soul of America. We must restore the soul of America.

Joe Biden
Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. It is time for our better angels to prevail.

Joe Biden
This is a great nation. And we are a good people. This is the United States of America. And there has never been anything we haven't been able to do when we've done it together.

Joe Biden
We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.

Joe Biden
I've always believed we can define America in one word: possibilities. That in America everyone should be given the opportunity to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them.

Joe Biden
Tonight, the whole world is watching America. I believe at our best America is a beacon for the globe. And we lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.

Joe Biden
It was that hard; I still feel that way. But I believe that President Bush failed to lead. History will judge him harshly not for the mistakes he made- we all make mistakes- but for the opportunities he squandered.

Joe Biden
Our work begins with getting COVID under control. We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality, or relish life's most precious moments – hugging a grandchild, birthdays, weddings, graduations, all the moments that matter most to us – until we get this virus under control.

Joe Biden
I believe in the possibility of this country. We're always looking ahead. Ahead to an America that's freer and more just. Ahead to an America that creates jobs with dignity and respect.

Joe Biden
To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the feet of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.

Joe Biden
The one thing I want my kids to remember about me is that I was an athlete. The hell with the rest of this stuff.

Joe Biden
The fabric of our complex society is woven too tightly to permit any part of it to be damaged without damaging the whole.

Joe Biden
I'm not exploring. I'm in. And this is the beginning of a marathon
Referring to his choice not to set up an "exploratory committee" and instead enter the race directly

Joe Biden
Things never got better, and Rumsfeld and Cheney never got any wiser. It became increasingly clear that those two men had eroded our country's claim to any moral high ground by flouting the Geneva Conventions. They forced policy decisions that allowed the hideous prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and encouraged the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners at our facility in Guantánamo in Cuba. I wasn't shy about hammering Rumsfeld.

Joe Biden
The system wasn't working, and I thought it was time to err on the side of a new model. What might work, I thought, was a system that promoted personal accountability, consistency, and certainty. Congress could say people who committed the same federal crime, under the same circumstances, were going to jail for the same amount of time. We could give judges a narrower set of sentencing guidelines to work with, and felons would be required to pay the same price. We'd be judging the crime, not the person.

Joe Biden
There is never a time when a president can act to stop a tragedy from occurring without being held politically accountable one way or the other. If he does it and fails, he's wrong. If he does it and succeeds, he was never right because it didn't happen. If we go in and stop an act of genocide, we can't prove what we stopped.

Joe Biden
These were al-Qaeda fighters, the first I'd ever seen up close, and they looked like badasses. As I passed on the outskirts of the grid, many of the prisoners stared directly at me. None of them cowered. I've been in a lot of prisons, but these guys showed a ferocity and a hatred unlike any I'd ever seen.

Joe Biden
I believe all Americans are born with certain inalienable rights. As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not denied by any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator, and they represent the essence of human dignity....

Joe Biden
For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. For too long as a nation, we have been lulled by the anthem of self-interest. For a decade, led by Ronald Reagan, self-aggrandizement has been the full-throated cry of this society: 'I've got mine, so why don't you get yours' and 'What's in it for me?'

Joe Biden
People ask if I can compete with the money of Hillary and Barack. I hope at the end of the day, they can compete with my ideas and my experience.

Joe Biden
I kept trying to tell people that just because I was young didn't mean I could speak for all young people.

Joe Biden
Rudy Giuliani — there's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11.

Joe Biden
Even the oil companies don't need an incentive of $4 billion to go out and explore. As my grandpop would say, 'They're doing just fine, thank you'.

Joe Biden
To Slobodan Milosevic:
I think you're a damn war criminal and you should be tried as one.
Slobodan Milosevic served as the President of Serbia from 1989 to 1992

Joe Biden