You can't fall back on the private sector and say, 'You take care of the nation's banking system.' That's a fundamental function of the government, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the FDIC, etc. All of those agencies have a major role to play there.

There comes a time when deceit and defiance must be seen for what they are. At that point, a gathering danger must be directly confronted. At that point, we must show that beyond our resolutions is actual resolve.

As I think about the future, I'm back where most people live their lives. Which is, death is not imminent, and that's different.

My own belief is that the way we grow the economy, create jobs, create wealth is in the private sector. The government doesn't do that.

The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

One of the worst things we could do is start to act now as though the attack of 9/11 is a thing of the past and will never be repeated. That's just not true.

I think the key that happened on 9/11 is we went from considering terrorist attacks as a law enforcement problem to considering terrorist attacks, especially on the scale we have on 9/11, as being an act of war.