...(W)e lose when by official policy or by official negligence we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget . . . that which is our greatest strength: that we are different and better than our enemies.

I think that when you look at the great politicians, the two greatest in my view were George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, they certainly had character traits. You also know Abraham Lincoln overcame severe depression problems that he had when he was younger, which gave him the strength and the character later on.

War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.

Teachers don't need as much as $140,000 a year, ... But, perhaps some senators don't need $140,000 a year either.

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.

I think [social media] is fundamentally restructuring the whole nature of information and how it's expressed in America.

We are an unfinished nation.