Let's be clear: Has the U.S. ever made any mistakes? Of course.Is the U.S. at all like [Vladimir] Putin's regime? Not at all.

There is no equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in [Vladimir] Putin's defense of his cronyism. There's no moral equivalency there.

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.

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.

It's not natural to have to suffer when we work. We're made to be productive, and yet the world we live in, there's a whole bunch of suffering. And what they need to understand as 10-year-olds, so that when they're 15 and slightly less protected, and when they're 20 and they're moving into a truly semi-independent state, they need to have experienced that memory of persevering and having gotten through hardship.

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.

I think the category of perpetual adolescence, it's a new thing, and it's a dangerous thing. Adolescence is a pretty glorious concept. It's about intentionally transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Being stuck in adolescence - that's a hell. Peter Pan is a dystopia, and we forget that.