Rand Paul Quotes

My worry now is that many people are talking about a partial repeal of Obamacare. If you only repeal part of it and you leave if some sort of Obamacare light, which some are talking about, my fear is the situation actually gets worse.

I will not let the patriot act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.

You don't go into politics unless you want to win.

America does not need to continue to have regime change throughout the world, nation-building.

If Senator Rubio were doing his job and in Congress more, he might know that the program 'phone records of a potential terrorist cause' continues. It's been ongoing for the last six months. So the Paris tragedy, this tragedy happened while we were still doing bulk collection, all bulk collection. Also in France, they have a program a thousand-fold more invasive, collecting all of the data of all of the French.

I would prefer the [USA] government to be the policeman and not the businessman.

This flirtation with isolationism in the Republican party is over. It's giving way to a more muscular foreign policy than I've been advocating. But I'm also advocating building up others. Build a small schoolhouse in Afghanistan to help a poor young girl have a say about her children will destroy the ideology more than a bomb.

If you are accused of being associated with terrorism, which could mean you are an Arab- American and you've sent e-mails to a relative in the Middle East, you should get your day in court, and I think you should get a lawyer and a trial, and I think most Americans agree to that.

Al Qaeda has been placed on the run, but not destroyed.

40 percent of people who come to visit America on a visa overstay their visa and we have no idea where they are. On 9/11, at least 2 of the hijackers were here on visa. They were traveling back and forth to the Middle East. And we really had no idea where they were or what they were doing. And they were overstaying their visa. So there are problems I think in the immigration system that need to be fixed for our safety.

I don't plan on being bashful.

I'm not accusing anybody of being [Hitler].

I would pay to have those adjudications enrolled into the federal background system so we could detect people who are mentally ill before they buy a gun. That is a real problem.

The money in the stabilization fund, $130 billion which I call an insurance bailout, is put in to try to cure the adverse selection that Obamacare created by making insurance too expensive. Healthy people didn't buy it. They tried to fix this by forcing young people to buy it through an individual mandate. Even that didn't work. So the way the Republicans fix it is they don't actually fix it. They subsidize it. So we have to fix what went wrong with Obamacare, not just recapitulate something that's broken.

The Republican Party is an empty vessel unless we imbue it with values.

Congress shall pass no law that exempts themselves!

Any time someone tries to tell you that metadata is 'meaningless, don't worry, it's just who you call, it's just phone records, it's not a big deal' - realize we kill people based on metadata. So they must be pretty darn certain that they think they know something based on metadata.

I don't think I've ever used the word 'gay rights,' because I don't really believe in rights based on your behavior.

The Republican platform specifically says we don't believe in bailing out private business, and yet we did.

I think the problem with John Bolton is he disagrees with President Trump's foreign policy. He would be closer to John McCain's foreign policy. John Bolton still believes the Iraq war was a good idea. He still believes that regime change is a good idea. He still believes that nation-building is a good idea.

In battle, combatants engaged in war against America get no due process and may lawfully be killed. But citizens not in a battlefield - however despicable - are guaranteed a trial by our Constitution. No one argues that Americans who commit treason shouldn't be punished. The maximum penalty for treason is death. But the Constitution specifies the process necessary to convict.

2007 was a long time ago, and events do change over long periods of time.

Both sides of the aisle - Republican and Democrat - have been unwilling and afraid to address the deficit, and someone's got to.

What most Americans don't realize is there is an unholy alliance. They come together. There's a secret handshake. We spend more money on everything. And we are not stronger nation if we go further into debt. We are not projecting power from bankruptcy court.

I don't know about [Rex] Tillerson, but I do know that John Bolton doesn't get it. He still believes in regime change. He's still a big cheerleader for the Iraq war. He's promoted a nuclear attack by Israel on Iran. He wants to do regime change in Iran. So, I think John Bolton is so far out of it and has such a naive understanding of the world. If he were to be the assistant or the undersecretary for Tillerson, I'm an out automatic no on Bolton.

The vast majority of my time is traveling and talking about the issues. It isn't really calling and asking for money.

I tell people I won't vote to go to war unless I'm ready to go or send my kids.

Big and oppressive government has long been the enemy of freedom, something black Americans know all too well.

We had people coming to our Foreign Relations Committee and saying, "Oh, we need to arm the allies of Al Qaida." They are still saying this. It is a crazy notion. This is the biggest debate we should be having is is regime change a good idea; has it been a good idea.

I'm the leading voice in America for not arming the allies of ISIS.

I think we need to treat everybody with dignity.

I do not yet know if I will find a Romney presidency more acceptable on foreign policy. But I do know that I must oppose the most recent statements made by Mitt Romney in which he says he, as president, could take us to war unilaterally with Iran, without any approval from Congress.

I've introduced legislation to say, "For right now, let's stop it," from about 34 countries.

If I have a weakness, it's that I try to live by the rules. I try to live by the rules, no matter what they are, and I was brought up that way as a kid. Play by the rules.

I support local solutions to illegal immigration as protected by the 10th amendment. I support making English the official language of all documents and contracts.

No president has the right to say he is judge, jury and executioner.

ISIL is not the JV team. I cannot stress enough that there's a terrorist army in Syria and Iraq that wants to attack the homeland and we're not doing anything about it. So how do you defeat the ideology? Build up others? You reject Rand Paul.

[John] Bolton was an advocate for regime change in Libya, so was Hillary Clinton actually. And Donald Trump said it was a mistake. I agree it was a mistake to do regime change in Libya. We became more endangered and actually worse people took over afterwards.

Every chance at destabilizing [Bashar] Assad... the bombing campaign causes a flood of refugees into Jordan, there's already half a million in Jordan. I think a bombing campaign - I think it's hard to argue that a U.S. bombing campaign is going to cause less refugees. And I think it causes more refugees and more of a humanitarian disaster. I think it causes, or allows, the risk of Israel being attacked with a gas attack to go up, if we attack Assad. So there's all kinds of bad things.

The 11 million, I think, are never going home, don't need to be sent home, and I would incorporate them into our society by giving them work visas and making them taxpayers.

I think we have a Tea Party mandate, and that Tea Party mandate is for good-government type of things, things like term limits, things like a balanced budget amendment, things like read the bills for goodness sakes, things like that maybe Congress should only pass legislation that they apply to themselves as well.

If someone tries to put limits on the press, I'll be the first one standing up for the right of press, left and right, to continue saying and being part of the discussion and forwarding the discussion.

Right now in the insurance markets, we have sort of a disaster unfolding, a downward spiral, adverse selection, premiums in the individual market going through the roof. People can't afford insurance and insurance companies are losing hundreds of millions of dollars. If you repeal part of Obamacare to get rid of the individual mandate but keep some of the ideas, that people can still buy insurance after they're sick, the situation gets extraordinarily worse. And so what we're seeing now could be tenfold greater if you only repeal part of Obamacare.

There is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street. Likewise, there is nothing progressive about billion dollar loans to millionaires to build solar panels.

We as Republicans have taken the easy way out a lot of times.

I think if you have a two-story office and you hire someone who's handicapped, it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator.

The other thing to realize is that almost all these shootings, including this shooting [in San-Bernardino], happened in a government building where people are not allowed to defend themselves. While it's not the ultimate answer, the ultimate answer would be no violence, part of the answer is saying, "We need to allow people to defend themselves."

I think it's a little premature to talk about response until we know exactly what happened, but we should know what happened. And we should know how to defend [against hackers attacks] ourselves without question.