Evan Bayh

Through our own hard work and ingenuity, America has spent much of its history as the world's dominant economic power. But our dominance is not pre-ordained - history does not roll along on the wheels of inevitability.

The United States must not allow North Korea to exacerbate tensions between our key strategic allies in Asia. As the leader of the free world, the United States needs to support our regional allies who are standing up to a Stalinist regime that is intent on developing nuclear weapons.

The United States depends on South Korea and Japan to help promote American values in East Asia.

China's island-building in the South China Sea poses a threat to U.S. national security interests in the region.

As with any difficult challenge that the public and policymakers face, there is no single solution or silver bullet that will serve as the answer to how the United States works to reduce carbon emissions.

As Democrats, we have a patriotic duty and political imperative to lay out our ideas for protecting America.

We need a foreign policy that is both tough... and smart. The good news? That is the historic legacy of the Democratic Party.

We need leaders who appeal to us to think about something other than narrow self-interest but instead focus upon the greater good.

Americans have always prized individuality - it is part of our national DNA - but America is a community that draws strength from the sum of our people and has always known that the total of that sum is worth far more than its individual parts.

A few decades ago, the Irish decided they were tired of being always near the bottom of Europe's economic indicators. So they envisioned a better future for their country, and they put their people on the right road to get there.

We know that a college degree is rapidly becoming the price of admission to the global economy.

Sometimes, when I come back to Washington from Indiana, I feel like an ambassador to a foreign country.

Sometimes, it takes leaving to gain some perspective. I see that clearly every time I leave Washington, D.C., and return to Indiana. I see the bizarre bubble that seems to enclose the Beltway and makes people forget what regular people care about.

It shouldn't take a constitutional crisis or an attack on the nation to create honest dialogue in the Senate.

My father, Birch Bayh, represented Indiana in the Senate from 1963 to 1981. A progressive, he nonetheless enjoyed many friendships with moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats.

While romanticizing the Senate of yore would be a mistake, it was certainly better in my father's time.

Many good people serve in Congress. They are patriotic, hard-working, and devoted to the public good as they see it, but the institutional and cultural impediments to change frustrate the intentions of these well-meaning people as rarely before.

Companies that are publicly held have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to try to maximize their profits within ethical reasons.

My father was on the Judiciary Committee all 18 years. He had a good personal relationship with Jim Eastland. They probably didn't agree on practically anything, or very little, from a public policy standpoint. But they were willing to work through that to see what they could get done just because they knew each other and liked each other.

No one ever built the filibuster rule. It just kind of was created.

Between being governor and part of the Senate, one of the things I did was I held a chair at the business school at my alma mater, Indiana University. And I'd go to lecture the graduates, and I loved that, answering their questions. It was real; it was tangible, and it was making a difference every day.

I care about family issues.

Any time a party has lost three consecutive elections, it becomes a bit more willing to explore the notion of principled compromise so it's able to pursue some of its objectives.

The most important area for spending restraint is entitlement reform.

To regain our political footing, we must prove to moderates that Democrats can make tough choices.

Every once in a while, an election comes along, and who you are and what you believe gets subsumed in a larger tide. It just happens.

I love my father, and I believe in him. And he lost to Dan Quayle. I had a hard time understanding how that could happen.

The fastest-growing part of the Pentagon's budget are health care expenses.

Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.

Ultimately, the American people ourselves need to decide we care more about practical solutions and progress than we do about brain-dead ideology and political wrangling.

We all have things in life we'd do over again.

My mother wrote a book. Unfortunately, it ended up being published posthumously. But I'm glad she did, because it taught me a lot about my family that, otherwise, I probably wouldn't know.

Sometimes you have to make tough decisions to hold the line on spending.

Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters.

Any time a president is re-elected, he has a little more political clout to get things done.

I've never stopped being a Hoosier.

I like a lot of my Republican colleagues, starting with my friend from Indiana, Senator Lugar. We've had an excellent relationship.

I've always cared about education, and I worked with Senator Schumer on making several thousand dollars of college tuition tax deductible. That will help a lot of your middle class families make college more affordable.

If you are the executive, you're probably going to have more of an impact than if you're one of a hundred members of the Senate, certainly one of 435 members of the House.

I'm a former governor, and so I was the chief executive, and when the legislature wasn't in session, I was running the state.

I intend to continue to fight for the things I think are right for my country.

It doesn't take a degree in economics to know that something is wrong when it takes $30 or $40 to fill up the gas tank.

Filibusters should require 35 senators to... make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. The number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.

I'm pleased to offer analysis of public policy and politics to the millions of Americans who get their news from Fox.

Of course, the genesis of a good portion of the gridlock in Congress does not reside in Congress itself. Ultimate reform will require each of us, as voters and Americans, to take a long look in the mirror, because in many ways, our representatives in Washington reflect the people who have sent them there.

Filibusters have proliferated because under current rules just one or two determined senators can stop the Senate from functioning. Today, the mere threat of a filibuster is enough to stop a vote; senators are rarely asked to pull all-nighters like Jimmy Stewart in 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'

Challenges of historic import threaten America's future. Action on the deficit, economy, energy, health care and much more is imperative, yet our legislative institutions fail to act. Congress must be reformed.

Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials.

You now have six-year campaigns for the Senate - you never stop running. It's not uncommon for a member of the Senate to have a fundraising breakfast, a fundraising lunch and a fundraising dinner, and then when the Senate breaks for the week to go home, more fundraisers. And that's driven by the cost of campaigning.

If one of my boys was asking me if they should go into politics, I'd say there's only one reason to go into public life and that's to help people.