Jim Webb Quotes

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Jim Webb

Profession : Politician

Birth : February 9, 1946

I'm probably more comfortable inside a Marine Corps rifle company than I am anywhere in my life.

Jim Webb

The frustration of the Senate is that it's slow. It looks like an aquarium.

Jim Webb

I'm a combative person, I know I am, and the greatest thing about law school was I learned to fight with my brain. I clarified something to myself. No matter how much you want to live in the white man's world, you either live by what you believe in, or you die.

Jim Webb

I am not convinced the Clean Air Act was ever intended to regulate or classify as a dangerous pollutant something as basic and ubiquitous in our atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Jim Webb

I have strong reasons for being a Democrat. Basically if you want true fairness in society, you want to give a voice in the corridors of power for the people who otherwise would not have it, I believe that will come from the Democratic Party.

Jim Webb

Ronald Reagan came in - he was a leader. Some of my Democratic friends don't like it when I say that. He had a vision where he wanted to take the country, and things started moving again.

Jim Webb

It's a very tough thing to run for office, but it's also the way the American people get to know you.

Jim Webb

I was counsel on the full veterans committee, the first Vietnam veteran to serve as a full-committee counsel in Congress. It stunned me that there was a 600,000-case backlog of claims. During my time in the Senate, it became 900,000.

Jim Webb

When my father went back into the military in 1947 and was gone for 3-1/2 years, my mother was 24 years old with four kids in a town she didn't know that well with no military services available, no family services available through the military, and that was the norm.

Jim Webb

From the time I left the Marine Corps after serving as an infantry platoon and company commander in Vietnam, I decided that I would focus on immediate goals that inspired me to devote all of my energy to them, rather than putting together the more cautious and traditional building blocks of a predictable career.

Jim Webb

On any given vote, on any given day, a smart senator who has taken a bold or controversial position can reach far more media outlets between the elevator and the Senate chamber than he or she could garner in a full press conference back home.

Jim Webb

The Senate floor is and always has been the great arena of our democracy. I spent eight years in my younger life as a boxer, and sometimes when I enter the chamber, I think, 'This is the ring. The American people can see us here and listen to our arguments. This is where the fights matter.'

Jim Webb

Your first six months in the Senate, you spend a lot of time wondering how the hell you got here. After that, you look around at your colleagues and wonder how the hell any of them got here.

Jim Webb

I have proudly spent several periods in government, but I'm not a career politician. I come from a family of 'citizen soldiers.'

Jim Webb

I fought as an infantry Marine on one of the Vietnam War's harshest battlefields. After leaving the Marine Corps, I studied law and found a fulfilling career as an author and journalist. But again and again, I came back to the personal fulfillment that can only come from public service.

Jim Webb

Throughout the world, our insistence on individual freedom and opportunity has been at the bottom of what people think when they hear the very word 'American.'

Jim Webb

I just like the people and the culture of Southeast Asia.

Jim Webb

If a minister can lead the Senate in prayer every day... what is so wrong with beginning every day of school with an ecumenical prayer?

Jim Webb

It's hard for me to think about this, but I first went to Southeast Asia as a Marine more than 40 years ago, as a young Marine. I was on Okinawa and then in Vietnam. I've returned in many different hats, which I think has helped me to form my own views about policy out there. I've spent a good bit of time in this region as a journalist.

Jim Webb

I was the principal negotiator for the Department of Defense, when I was secretary of the Navy, on the issue of Toshiba technology concerns with American submarines.

Jim Webb