“The highest priority you can have is education.”

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.

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.

It’s evolution, man. Eventually the student becomes the teacher.

I will never be a stupid girl… and neither should you. Today, charting your own course isn’t just more necessary than ever before… it’s also much easier — and much more fun. A good education is one of the greatest gifts you could ever give yourself.

In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you came from; it matters only where you are going.

The best armor against everything around you is to be well educated, to work hard, to be twice as good as if you had to be, to do languages and culture better.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

Maths is totally done differently to what I was teached when I was at school.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.