I think I'm one of five people in the Senate who's never been a politician before. And now that I am a politician, what I find weird about it is that I respect myself less.

So [Vladimir] Putin is a mess. He's committed all sort of murderous thuggery, and I am opposed to the way Putin conducts himself in world affairs, and I hope that the president also wants to show moral leadership about this issue.

We obviously have to honor the commitments that have been made to the people who are already retired or near the retirement age. But we need to tell the truth about the fact that when we set the retirement age at age 65 in America, life expectancy was only 62.

In the American constitutional system of three different branches, conflict - and I mean that peaceful, vigorous debate - it's a feature of our system, not a bug. We need less all-or - winner-take-all politics.

While Admiral Neffenger is an impressive man, it is naive and dangerous to pretend installing one director can heal what ails TSA, the Department of Homeland Security needs to admit that it has a crisis of bureaucratic complacency - lacking an overarching vision and coherent measures of success and failure.

There are two ways that you can go wrong in our long-term fight against jihadis. One would be to not acknowledge that terrorism and especially jihadi-motivated terrorism, comes from specific places in the world and is connected to specific ideologies. But another way to fall off a cliff and harm our long-term interests would be to imply that the U.S. is at war with Islam.

D.C. is known as Hollywood for ugly people.