We have to preserve it and use it sustainably. And the short-term use of resources at the destruction of the long-term heritage of this country is not a policy that we can pursue.

I'm a product of a Notre Dame education; those professors taught me a lot about how you separate the city of God from the state. I'm also a reverent follower of the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. My years of public life have simply confirmed the intensity of my belief that what I have learned from Joe Evans and Thomas Jefferson was correct.

I think of Martin Luther King phrase a lot when I'm deciding public issues. He said: "Here I stand: I can do no other." It is basically an affirmation of my ultimate responsibility to obey my conscience in my acts as a public official.

I am one of those people who deeply resents not having been born in the 19th century, when there were still open places to explore.

Well, I think breathing life into the Endangered Species Act, taking those wolves back into Yellowstone, restoring the salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest.

If the bishops are saying that it is divine revelation that seven percent of unemployment is morally unacceptable and that that is a teaching which must as a matter of faith be accepted by all Catholics, I respectfully dissent.

We had kind of a rocky start, but I spent a lot of time working with the President and handing him statistics and showing him what we were doing as we went along and kind of saying to him, you know, this is really important.