As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was.

You serve the country, and you help the President. If the President wants you to leave, you know, you are two corridors down.

The most important social welfare program in America is a job.

Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.

Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

Even if Iraq IS a civil war, people have won civil wars.

Nothing gets done (in Congress) unless it's bipartisan. And the reason that matters is that it's a function of reality.