Explore Quotes by John F. Kerry

You can't let concerns stop you; they drive you and they motivate you.

I love to play guitar and hack around. I was in a band when I was in high school. I never learned to play very well, but I enjoyed it.

I think George Mitchell is a consummate professional. He is the ideal selection to handle the job of special envoy if you choose to have a special envoy.

The consequences of a crime should not be out of proportion to the crime itself.

You just don't, in the 21st century, behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.

Real Democrats don't abandon the middle class.

I would rather be the candidate of the NAACP than the NRA.

If we don't preserve the oceans from nitrate runoff and plastic and chemicals, and if we don't preserve it from acidification, and if we don't preserve it from grotesque overfishing - too much money chasing too few fish - we're going to have the most massive ecosystem on the planet in peril.

Democracy relies on free speech. Yes, say anything you want, but it relies even more on the speech being truthful. It is the truth, after all, that sets us free.

Climate change, if unchecked, is an urgent threat to health, food supplies, biodiversity, and livelihoods across the globe.

I know there are a lot of musicians and a lot of artists, and there are a lot of writers and other people who inspire young people, but I'd like to see somebody in political life be able to connect and make these choices that we need to make in Washington real in terms of people's lives.

Foreign policy is effectively the assertion of many individual countries intersecting on the global marketplace. And you have to figure out how to get your interest served in a way that meets the interests and needs of these other folks.

Republican secretaries of state from Kissinger to Baker, Powell to Rice, President Bush, 71 United States Senators all supported President Obama's new START treaty, but not Mitt Romney.

It took President Obama to make America lead like America again.

In the time I've spent in public life, one of the things I've learned is that some issues look a lot different when you're actually in office compared to when you're on the campaign trail.

War should be not a war of choice; it should be a war of necessity. And it should be a last resort.

We don't differ with the government on the demands [on Iran], but we totally reject how Bibi is handling it. Bibi sacrificed good relations with the U.S. to keep the status quo on the Palestinians. He poked the [Obama] Administration in the eye on settlements just to appease right-wingers

I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.

Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don't have the judgment to be President.

It is the duty of any president, in the final analysis, to defend this nation and dispel the security threat. Saddam Hussein has brought military action upon himself by refusing for 12 years to comply with the mandates of the United Nations. The brave and capable men and women of our armed forces and those who are with us will quickly, I know, remove him once and for all as a threat to his neighbors, to the world, and to his own people, and I support their doing so.

It appears that with the deadline for exile come and gone, Saddam Hussein has chosen to make military force the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism. If so, the only exit strategy is victory, this is our common mission and the world's cause.