There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.

I'm a Catholic by background. I was raised in Goa, a part of India that was visited by Portuguese missionaries a few hundred years ago, which explains my last name.

For me, victory isn't measured by winning in the traditional sense.

I do think American culture has shifted a little bit away from the contemplative more toward the visual, more toward the emotional, and more toward the expressive. I don't think there's a lot that can be done about that. We just have to understand that it's the product of technology and of the way people live now.

There's one America that Barack Obama wants, and there's a very different America that I want. I want an America that is entrepreneurial, that has a strong private sector in which religious faith is respected and even nourished, in which there's vigorous debate across the spectrum, and in which our universities teach real history instead of propaganda. Certainly the decline of America is a choice, though the outcome is not foreordained. But liberty is also a choice, and I'm doing my best to persuade the people of America to make the latter choice.

With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future.

Blacks' problems lie not in the heads of white people but rather in the wasted and incompletely fulfilled lives of too many black people.