Citizenship means standing up for the lives that gun violence steals from us each day. I have seen the courage of parents, students, pastors, and police officers all over this country who say 'we are not afraid,' and I intend to keep trying, with or without Congress, to help stop more tragedies from visiting innocent Americans in our movie theaters, shopping malls, or schools like Sandy Hook.

You always hear about waste and abuse in Washington. And usually it doesn't mean much, because nobody ever finds where that waste and abuse is.

I very much believe in reforming the tax system.

I get letters from [people getting insurance] right now. "You saved my child's life." "I did not have to sell my home when my wife got sick." And that is what, as a policy maker, I'm trying to achieve during the short period of time that I'm here.

And that, I suppose, is what I'd been trying to tell my mother that day: that her faith in justice and rationality was misplaced, that we couldn't overcome after all, that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn't help you plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.

If we got there and we looked up and we said, "You know what? Black folks are still doing a little bit worse off than whites, but it's not like it was 20 years ago," then we can have a discussion about how do we get that last little bit. But that's a high-class problem to have.

I'll be honest, there have been times when I've listened to the rhetoric in Europe where an easy equivalent somehow between the United States and Russia and between how our governments operate versus other governments operate, where those distinctions aren't made.