The first pork-barrel bill that crosses my desk, I'm going to veto it and make the authors of those pork-barrel items famous all over America.

Our economy, I think, is still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States? The vice president has two duties. One is to break a tie in case of a tie vote in the United States Senate... The other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. Neither one of those are very challenging as compared to being able to live for a good part of the time in the state of Arizona.

In the 2012 election, Obamacare, as it's called, and I'll be more polite - the ACA ...was a major issue in the campaign. I campaigned all over America for two months, everywhere I could. And in every single campaign rally I said, 'We have to repeal and replace Obamacare.' Well, the people spoke. They spoke, much to my dismay, but they spoke. And they reelected the President of the United States.

I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in, or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president.

Senator Obama voted against Justice Breyer and Justice Roberts on the grounds that they didn't meet his ideological standards. That's not the way we should judge these nominees. Elections have consequences.

There is always an element of realpolitik that has to be present in the conduct of any nation's national security affairs. At the same time, we have to also have a balance between realpolitik and Wilsonian principles of freedom and democracy and human rights. And maintaining that balance is the greatest challenge that we in the West, including the Federal Republic of Germany, have to face because it's many times a very difficult decision-making process.