“America is a place where we all come together. It is a place of consensus.”

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.

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.

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.

So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realize that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.

Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.

If we live in our oneness-heart, we will feel the essence of all religions which is the love of God. Forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, brotherhood and the feeling of oneness are the signs of a true religion.

The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honored. You do not have to keep it in anymore. You can let go into the heart of compassion; you can weep.

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?

Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.