“Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.”

Unless you really stand for something, people aren’t motivated to go out and vote for you.

Cut defense spending as part of cutting all federal spending.

I think women have come a long way. Women are in positions not because they’re women, they’re in positions because they’re intelligent and they should be equal to their counterparts and treated equally.

I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government.

I do believe people ought to be left alone. I don’t care who you are or what you do at home or who your friends are or where you hang out, what kind of music you listen to, what you do in your home is your own business. That’s always been who I am. I am a leave me alone kind of guy.

I’m not someone who’s sort of still trying to figure out what I believe in.

If I have a weakness, it’s that I try to live by the rules. I try to live by the rules, no matter what they are, and I was brought up that way as a kid. Play by the rules.

How much liberty do with want to give up for a false sense of security?

I read all of Ayn Rand’s novels when I was 17.

You can be strong without being involved in every single civil war around the world.

We should be proud that so many want to come to America, that it is still seen as the land of opportunity. Let’s make it a land of legal work, not black-market jobs. Let’s make it a land of work, not welfare. Our land should be one of assimilation, not hiding in the shadows.

I would introduce and support legislation to send Roe v. Wade back to the states.

I say the phone records of law abiding citizens are none of their damn business!

We have to think before we act.

The power to tax and spend is restricted by the enumerated powers.

Toppling secular dictators in the Middle East has only led to chaos and the rise of radical Islam.

The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

No civilization is complete which does not include the dumb and defenseless of God’s creatures within the sphere of charity and mercy.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium — by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilisation as against barbarism, of progress as against stability.

Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.

Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of the nation.

We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.