(J)ust to clarify: If you go into every situation saying there's absolutely nothing worth fighting over, you will inevitably end up on a cot sleeping next to a guy named Tiny, bringing him breakfast in his cell every morning, and spending your afternoons ironing his boxers. Or, in the case of the French, you might spend your afternoon rounding up Jews to send to Germany, but you get the point.

I like vengeance as much as the next guy, if the next guy likes vengeance a whole lot.

There is no - let me repeat - no example in the last quarter-century of a large, complex economy that has been successful with high taxes.

[There] is something fundamentally unpatriotic in the yearning to fundamentally transform your country.

The more you socialize the costs of personal liberty, the more license you give others to regulate it.

America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.

But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.