You don't know how it would have turned out if [kids] would grown up in Chicago instead, and a more normal environment.

All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.

One thing I don't like is when you disrespect the law.

Nobody said democracies supposed to be easy. It's hard. And in a big country like America, it probably should be hard.

The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11 ... The program does not involve the NSA examining the phone records of ordinary Americans. Rather, it consolidates these records into a database that the government can query if it has a specific lead - phone records that the companies already retain for business purposes.

I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.

No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.