Nobody should ever mistake and think that our country [USA] is weakened, or that authority is diffuse and unspecified, and that we are vulnerable.

Now, you might say – “But why should we pay people for doing what they’re supposed to do?” It’s a fair question – but think of it this way: Every other anti-poverty program that’s been tried has failed to get the national poverty rate below 11 percent... Why shouldn’t we experiment with a program built around the one strategy that has proven time and again to work wonders – capitalism?

What has changed is that people have stopped working together.

I've got the greatest job in the world. There's no other job in government where cause and effect is so tightly coupled where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways and in so many different people's lives. It's a great challenge.

One's a dog-eat-dog world, and the other one's just the opposite.

I think that ... none of [the candidates in he third party] have the courage to do what's right for the country. And I have, now, two grandchildren, which I didn't have before. I'd like to leave them a better world.

If it wasn't for O'Flanagan's Pub on Manhattan's Upper East Side, I don't know where I would have spent my Friday nights as a young man.