In Honor Of His Birthday This Week, Here's Some Real Talk From Bernie Sanders

from The Huffington Post:

Between his large crowds at campaign events and surging poll numbers, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has so far been the biggest surprise in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. In the past few months, Sanders has gone from "virtually having no chance" to causing concern for frontrunner Hillary Clinton's campaign.

A self-described democratic socialist who has a lot of ideas and a brash demeanor, Sanders can make some interesting statements. We've collected a few of his most intriguing and most provocative words on a wide range of issues, including marijuana and income inequality.

Here are some of the most notable things Sanders has said since announcing his White House run:

"We got to put young people to work, we got to give them an education, rather than putting them in jail," Sanders said in an interview on MSNBC's "The Ed Show."

"Ordinary people are profoundly disgusted with the fact that the middle class is being destroyed and income going to the top 1 percent," Sanders tweeted.

"Folks who do not like guns [are] fine. But we have millions of people who are gun owners in this country -- 99.9 percent of those people obey the law. I want to see real, serious debate and action on guns, but it is not going to take place if we simply have extreme positions on both sides. I think I can bring us to the middle," Sanders said in a CNN interview.

"It is insane and counter-productive to the best interests of our country, that hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, and that millions of others leave school with a mountain of debt that burdens them for decades. That must end," Sanders said during his campaign announcement.

"In the last 30 years there has been a massive -- we’re talking about many trillions of dollars being redistributed from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent. It is time to redistribute money back to the working families of this country from the top one-tenth of 1 percent," Sanders said on PBS's "Charlie Rose."

“I coughed a lot, I don’t know. I smoked marijuana twice -- didn’t quite work for me,” Sanders told Yahoo.

"So I do believe that we have to move toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. I think it's not going to happen tomorrow, but that certainly should be the goal," Sanders said on ABC’s "This Week."

"We’ve got to demilitarize the police -- we don’t need tanks, you don’t need heavy military equipment in the communities of the United States. We gotta pay attention to the African-American communities, to poverty so these kids get the education and job training they need," Sanders told Yahoo.

"Well, no, I do not have dual citizenship with Israel. I'm an American. I don't know where that question came from. I am an American citizen, and I have visited Israel on a couple of occasions. No, I'm an American citizen, period,” Sanders said in an interview with a D.C. NPR affiliate.

"Please don't tell me that the United States of America, our great country, cannot guarantee health care to all people. Don't tell me that every person in this country should not be able to get all the education that they need regardless of their income," Sanders said in Portland, Maine.

"A major problem of our campaign finance system is that anybody can start a super PAC on behalf of anybody and can say anything. And this is what makes our current campaign finance situation totally absurd," Sanders said to the Burlington Free Press.

"Despite the central role that undocumented workers play in our economy and in our daily lives, these workers are too often reviled by many for political gain and shunted into the shadows," Sanders said at the National Association of Latino Elected Officials conference.

"If a bank is too big to fail, that bank is too big to exist," Sanders said in Denver, Colorado.

"Our goal as a nation is that if somebody works 40 hours a week, that person will not be living in poverty," Sanders said in Iowa.

"What I can tell you is this: We have far, far, far too many people in jail for nonviolent crimes, and I think in many ways, the war against drugs has not been successful, and I think we've got to rethink that," Sanders told Yahoo News' Katie Couric.