“I support the death penalty for the kingpin, the guy at the top, but I don’t think you should throw a drug offender in jail for five years, and let a mugger out after a year.”

If we are going to stay a great power and I hope and pray we will we need the truth. We need to know what is going right and we need to know what is going wrong. There is no greater time than now.

This is government’s primary function – to keep us safe – and when large percentages in America don’t feel safe, they start asking: What am I paying my taxes for? What is government all about?

There are many reasons why Mitt Romney should not become president, but perhaps the most important of all is the narrowness of his experience, perspective and vision.

Crime can be a unifying argument – not an argument that people use as a code for us vs. them.

I’m strongly for a patient Bill of Rights. Decisions ought to be made by doctors, not accountants.

I think teaching should be an exalted profession, not a picked-on profession.

Inaction is perhaps the greatest mistake of all.

The public knows how many good things there are as part of the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans say they’re going to repeal. They don’t know what to replace it with.

Giving up even an ounce of precious freedom is a very serious thing to do.

You do have to change things as warfare changes.

Certainly any president – Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative – should keep an open mind until they get the briefing.

We need to make sure middle-class people are able to pay the bills. We need to make sure that poor people don’t starve. Those are values, too.

Democrats don’t relate to middle-class people.

As long as the Palestinians send terrorists onto school buses and to nightclubs to blow up people, Israel has no choice but to build the fence.

We tend to talk, Democrats, as a party, in legislative terms.

I’d like to see the health care professionals making decisions, not some bureaucrat in Indianapolis working for an insurance company.

Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.

I don’t think any person in America should die because they are too poor to live.

Live as tho death is not the inevitable end.

This is good for you. Death is a thing of beauty, and it needs to be executed in such a way that does it justice.

Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are.

How exhausting it must be to fear death, when you can simply howl at the moon.

I’ve noticed that about your people, Doctor. You find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million. You speak about the objective hardness of the Vulcan heart, yet how little room there seems to be in yours.

Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.