America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.

Liberty is the essential precondition for achieving virtue... In order to exercise virtue, we need to have the ability to choose freely.

Life after death is the elephant in the living room, the one that we are not supposed to notice.

The paradox of liberal tolerance is that it extends to Marxists, transsexuals, and Islamic radicals, but not to conservatives or Christians.

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.

Death is the great wrecking ball that destroys everything. Everything that we have done, everything that we are doing now, and all our plans for the future are completely and irrevocably destroyed when we die. Only teenagers live in that state of temporary insanity when they believe themselves immune from death.

Under normal circumstances, if the centerpiece of a president's campaign is helping the disadvantaged and we are our brother's keeper, the idea that this same guy has an actual brother living in third-world poverty without any help from Obama, this would have been on the cover of 'The New York Times.' But none of them are touching it.