To ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad, we all share the belief we have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.
Washington is a place where good ideas go to die.
Change has come to America.
I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.
Part of America’s genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shores.
Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.
Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.
Iraq is sort of a situation where you’ve got a guy who drove the bus into the ditch. You obviously have to get the bus out of the ditch, and that’s not easy to do, although you probably should fire the driver.
Our enemies are fully aware that they can use oil as a weapon against America. And if we don’t take this threat as seriously as the bombs they build or the guns they buy, we will be fighting the War on Terror with one hand tied behind our back.
I am the eternal optimist. I think that, over time, people respond to civility and – and rational argument.
Do something, Congress. Do anything.
With the magnitude of the challenges we face right now, what we need in Washington are not more political tactics – we need more good ideas. We don’t need more point-scoring – we need more problem-solving.
People are whupped. I’m whupped. My wife is whupped. Unless it’s your job to be curious, who really has the time to sit and ask questions and explore issues?
We should never forget that God granted us the power to reason so that we would do His work here on Earth – so that we would use science to cure disease, and heal the sick, and save lives.
We have to acknowledge the progress we made, but understand that we still have a long way to go. That things are better, but still not good enough.
It’s not just enough to change the players. We’ve gotta change the game.
Most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or as political operatives – professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems.
We’ve gotta restore the American people’s confidence in the ethics process by ensuring that political self-interest can no longer prevent politicians from enforcing ethics rules.
In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else’s civil war.
You don’t defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq.