My view on candidates on money is unless it's proven that the donor stole the money, the campaign keeps the money.

People need to understand that in Washington, the process is the punishment.

One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.

I am not a person of the left. But one of the things, the central idea of democracy is that you have a bigger investment in the system as a whole than you do in any particular outcome.

As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.

The elite isn't leading anymore. It's trapped.

We're not free because other people are nice, maybe other people aren't nice that day. We're free because we expect the institutions of government to work impersonally. That we expect people in government to understand they don't work for the president or the prime minister, they work for the government. And the government is always there.