Illinois Senator Paul Simon, once said "The test for a Supreme Court nominee is not where he stands on any one specific issue. The test is this: Will you use your power on the court to restrict freedom or expand it"?
Five states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina - have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks - stacks over 500 feet - were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere.
We in Illinois are very fortunate to have a number of historic structures that have added immeasurably to the cultural life of the state, to the tourism industry of the state which by the way is our number one industry.
I went to University of Illinois. Big school. 35,000 students. 800 black. . . I was the only black in every class. Hard to be absent.
Surely it's better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be.
In Memory of BPP Comrades Fred Hampton & Mark Clark, both assassinated by the US Government via the state and local government of Chicago, Illinois, December 4, 1969.
I'm from Downer's Grove, Illinois. We had a blackout there the other day, but fortunately the police made him get back into his car before he got too far.
I was born and grew up in Vandalia, Illinois, a small town of about 6,000. It was farm country, and this was the little county seat.
Our prayers at this time are prompted by the fact that the Governor of Illinois today is signing into Illinois law the redefinition of civil marriage, introducing not only an unprecedented novelty into our state law, but also institutionalizing an objectively sinful reality.
We go through life so fast and we never really get to enjoy moments. It seems like they go past us. . . Tonight I just wanted to take a minute, a moment and soak it in and be a kid from Robbins Illinois and be a kid from Marquette University.
Illinois has less than a 12 percent black population and I won with 55 percent of the vote.
Vermont is such a small state, and the most money that's ever been spent in the history of political campaigns there is $2 million. That number is going to be surpassed many times. Vermont remains a "cheap state" for the Republican National Committee. So putting $5 or $10 million into Vermont - compared to New York or California or Illinois - that's small potatoes.
I used to race at the YMCA in Crystal Lake, Illinois, they used to have a dirt track there, and there was also a track near Rockford, Illinois, that I would go to.
There are some who might say that somebody named Barack Obama can't be elected senator in the state of Illinois. They're probably the same folks who said that a guy named Rod Blagojevich couldn't be elected governor of the state of Illinois.
People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances.
'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
I was raised Catholic in Rockford, Illinois. But I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore. Oh God, no.
Our party is a diverse one, as is my home state of Illinois.
The great example, the killer example in history, is of course Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. Read his speeches. Read the debates. Wendell Phillips called him "the great slaver from Illinois. "
I first read [Wendell Berry] short-story collections, "Fidelity" and then "Watch with Me. " They just knocked my socks off. The characters and the fellowship of the small town reminded me of my own small town in Illinois. Then I discovered that, much like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, that all of Berry's fiction was centered in this same town.
