“And frankly, being a woman I think gives me a slightly different take on a lot of the issues and on a lot of the solutions to the problems we face.”

“I believe that our message of rebuilding America is one that will resonate with the American people.”

“I really think that's the key, part of the spiritual renewal that America needs to have, the notion that we really can have confidence in a better tomorrow.”

“I think Americans want to believe in this country again.”

“I think if we are actually going to accept our generation's responsibility, that's going to mean that we give our children no less retirement security than we inherited from our parents.”

“I think that we have a responsibility to make certain that we are fiscally responsible in order to assure, frankly, future generations don't have to pay our bills.”

“I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates.”

“I want people who believe in my message and where I am on issues to support me.”

“I was the only person of color in the Senate, and my colleagues were Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott.”

“If we can rebuild Iraq, we can rebuild Illinois and Indiana and if we can do Baghdad, we can do Baltimore.”

“Illinois has less than a 12 percent black population and I won with 55 percent of the vote.”

“I'm a results-oriented person and my Senate record shows that.”

“I'm committed to universal health coverage and education.”

“I'm used to people not paying me a whole lot of attention and underestimating me and, frankly, for me a big challenge is to have people believe that I can be the president of the United States.”

“Magic lies in challenging what seems impossible.”

“People just want to hear some common sense... and I bring to bear the experience in local government and state government and national government - I was the first woman in history on the Senate Finance Committee - not to mention the diplomatic international experience.”

“So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.”

“The fact is that the diversity in this political class serves the same interest as diversity in any arena, which is it stirs the competitive pot.”

“The failure in Ohio to have adequate voting capacity for the people who were registered and eligible to vote was an absolute denial of their right to vote.”

“The notion that we won the war against Iraq is like saying we won a war against Arizona. I mean, the fact of the matter is it's not that big of a country. Nobody, I don't think, had any notion that we would do anything but win it.”

“The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.”

“The reason that minorities and women don't have a better shot at getting elected to the Senate or to statewide office is because the campaign finance rules are so skewed as to make it very difficult for non-traditional candidates to raise the money necessary to get elected.”

“There are a number of steps that we can take to reinvigorate and rebuild the economic and the physical infrastructure of our country and then to rebuild us, frankly, on a spiritual level.”

“We must invest in infrastructure development and rebuilding communities to create jobs.”

“Well, if you pick a fight with somebody that's smaller than you and you beat them, where's the honor in that?”

“We're failing our children with education, we're failing our environment.”