“During the Great Depression African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights, but they became impatient for economic emancipation.”

The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.

In a free society we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we’re civilized people we publicly criticize that and don’t belong to those groups or associate with those people.

If our freedom is taken, the American dream will wither and die.

The U.S. should never get involved where we have no clear national interest. We should not intervene militarily in a country like Syria, where we can’t separate friend from foe and might end up arming the very people who hate us the most.

The Republican Party is an empty vessel unless we imbue it with values.

If you think you have the right to health care, you are saying basically that I am your slave. I provide health care… My staff and technicians provide it… If you have a right to health care, then you have a right to their labor.

I don’t want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

Every child in every neighborhood, of every color, class and background, deserves a school that will help them succeed.

We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people, so just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone.

The Republican promise is for policies that create economic growth. Republicans believe lower taxes, less regulation, balanced budgets, a solvent Social Security and Medicare will stimulate economic growth.

I think we need to treat everybody with dignity.

There is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street. Likewise, there is nothing progressive about billion dollar loans to millionaires to build solar panels.

I will not vote to send my sons, or your sons, daughters, brothers, sisters or friends to fight for a stalemate.

Inherent to socialism is the absence of choice. If I want to choose my own pretzels or books or iphones, they prevent me – they fine me, or imprison me. And those systems, not infrequently have historically, have developed into systems where there are programs.

It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money.

America’s not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.

The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.

Of all the treasures a state can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.

I have dual citizenship.

…International education cannot be the work of one country. It is the responsibility and promise of all nations. It calls for free exchange and full collaboration…The knowledge of our citizens is one treasure which grows only when it is shared.

Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.

Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, ‘His color is not mine,’ or ‘His beliefs are strange and different,’ in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.

Citizenship consists in the service of the country.