The Bible tells me that no greater love has a man than to lay down his life for his friends. John Kerry's fellow crewmates -- the men I am honored to share the stage with -- are living testimony to his leadership, his courage under fire, and his willingness to risk his life for his fellow Americans. There is no greater act of patriotism than that.

If we don't know where [bin Laden] is, how can we go after him?

I'm one of the three Vietnam veterans that George Bush went after. He came to my state five different times and they ran millions of dollars worth of ads with me and Saddam Hussein up there.

We gave you the authority to go after those who came after us.

The Bush campaign is trying to define John Kerry now, but for my money, the defining moment was 35 years ago when both of these young men, graduating from Yale from favored families, had a defining moment in their lives, ... John choose to volunteer and serve his country and risk his life doing so. George Bush did not.

This looks like a real war zone to me. Thirty years ago, I was in Vietnam, and I haven't seen such devastation since then.

We want George Bush to put up or shut up, ... Stand up to the plate and say, 'This is wrong. An attack on valorous service of a fellow American is wrong.' And he's behind it, and his campaign is behind it.

The American consumer is not chopped liver, ... We ought to know about these things.

[The hearings also came in the wake of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, with significant numbers of the National Guard of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama deployed in Iraq.] It is time we looked after our own backyard, ... We cannot do this as long as we continue to make Iraq the fifty-first state.