There's a whole generation that's retiring. It is unconscionable that the average salary of a lawyer is $79,000 a year and the average salary of a teacher is $39,000 a year.

Anybody who believes the surge has not succeeded, militarily, politically and in most other ways, frankly, does not know the facts on the ground.

We should exhibit no self doubt to our friends, ... Credibility is a strategic asset.

There is no moral equivalent between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel Vladimir Putin and the United States of America, the country that Ronald Reagan used to call a shining city on a hill.

Right now there’s kind of a generational change. Young Americans do not trust this government. Without trusting government you can't do a lot of things.

I am a Republican. I'm loyal to the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. And I believe that my party, in some ways, has strayed from those principles, particularly on the issue of fiscal discipline.

Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence, because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop. Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy – if not in this war, then in the next. And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas, because inevitably these abuses become public.