Rand Paul Quotes

I need to be very careful about going on certain networks that seem to have a bias.

My great grandfather, like many, came to this country in search of the American Dream.

The most important thing you will do is yet to be seen. For me, I found my important thing to do when I learned to do surgery on the eye, when I learned to restore a person's vision.

I would introduce and support legislation to send Roe v. Wade back to the states.

What is immoral for an individual to do, is immoral for a government to do

For liberty to expand, government must shrink. For the economy to grow, government must get out of the way.

We have 11 million people said to be in our country illegally. Forty percent of them are said to have overstayed their visa. Do we know where they are?

I would set aside all these budget cuts that are going to devastate the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the N.S.A. Sequestration, cuts, are not only gutting the military, they're gutting the F.B.I. So if I were president, I would set these cuts aside. I would reinstate the N.S.A. program as robust as possible within the constitutional limits.

When I asked the president [Barack Obama], can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It's an easy question. It should have been a resounding and unequivocal no. The president's response, he hasn't killed anyone yet.

You have to decide in advance whether you're ready go to war. If you guys are ready to send a million troops into Ukraine and fight World War III, you're going to do it without my support because I think that's a really foolish notion.

We have a lot of politicians who have really small brains and really big hearts.

Gun control is not part of a strategy to defeat radical Islam or take ISIL down. However it is a problem back here at home. A million people have been adjudicated a danger to themselves or to others at the state court level.

I don't think we're doing an adequate vetting process of those who are coming to our country.

This is an ongoing threat from a variety of sources around the world. And actually I think it works both ways. I'm not privy to it, but I think all of the various country that have the ability are invading each other's computers all the time. But we have to protect our data. It's very important.

Some people say I chastise the Republican Party too much.

How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, how did that party become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote?

Unless you really stand for something, people aren't motivated to go out and vote for you.

You campaigned against rich people and you got enough envy whipped up in the country and you're gonna get 'em. You're gonna stick it to those rich people. But guess what? You may not get anymore revenue. You may not get anymore economic growth. But you can say, 'I stuck it to the rich people.'

I still say exactly what my original opinion is. Do you borrow money from China to send it to anyone? Out of your surplus, you can help your allies, and Israel is a great ally. And this is no particular animus of Israel, but what I will say, and I will say over and over again, we cannot give away money we don't have.

I think that if you believe in regime change, you're mistaken. In 2013, we put 600 tons of weapons - us, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar - into the war against [Bashar] Assad. By pushing Assad back, we did create a safe space.

I think that by arming the allies of ISIS, the Islamic rebels against [Bashar] Assad, that we created a safe space or made that space bigger for ISIS to grow.

I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race.

Secretary [John] Kerry has called Civil War [in Syria] an unbelievably small war that we're going to get involved with.

Any time you make an analogy to horrific people in history, Mussolini or Hitler, people say, 'Oh, you're exaggerating, you're talking about, it's hyperbole.' Maybe it is. ... But I would say is that if you are not concerned that democracy could produce bad people, I don't think you're really thinking this through too much.

I'm here in Whoopi Goldberg's office trying to choose some shoes. We've seen [Marco] Rubio has those cool new boots and I don't want to be outdone.

It is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.

The problem is that in our country, they make it almost impossible for politicians to win anything. In England it's easier to win a libel suit.

What my bill would do would be only for refugees going forward. So I haven't taken a position on sending anyone home. But I have taken the position that we have a lot of problems here in our country. And that one of the things that we do - charity is about giving your own money. Charity isn't giving someone else's money.

On vague wording of drone strike criteria: “Are you going to just drop a hellfire missile on Jane Fonda? Are you going to drop a missile on Kent State? That’s gobbledygook.

The coarsening of our culture towards violent death has more consequences than war. Tragically, this same culture has led to the death of 50 million unborn children in the last 40 years. I don't think a civilization can long endure that does not have respect for all human life, born and not yet born. I believe there will come a time when we are all judged on whether or not we took a stand in defense of all life from the moment of conception until our last natural breath.

President Obama said, oh, we want to make insurance perfect for people, but he added all these regulatory mandates, made it too expensive. Young, healthy people didn't buy it, and the people remaining in the insurance pool were sicker and sicker. That's the adverse selection and the death spiral of Obamacare. And so really we do need to discuss the intricacies of what worked and what didn't work in Obamacare. And I think the better way to do this is to let individuals have the freedom to choose what kind of insurance is best for them. The government doesn't always know best.

You either believe in the Constitution, or you don't.

President Obama, I think, wanted what was best for the country, but I think it didn't work well. I think we have the death spiral, and I think particularly premiums in the individual market are going through the roof. Republicans want what's best for the country, but I think they're not fixing the death spiral of Obamacare. They're going to subsidize it with a lot of taxpayer money. So, characterizing something as mean or generous I think goes to people's motives, and I think it is sort of why we have such an angry country now. We think that people have ill motives.

America's not the world's policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.

We should be proud that so many want to come to America, that it is still seen as the land of opportunity. Let's make it a land of legal work, not black-market jobs. Let's make it a land of work, not welfare. Our land should be one of assimilation, not hiding in the shadows.

We need a Republican Party that shows up on the South side of Chicago and shouts at the top of our lungs, 'We are the party of jobs and opportunity! The GOP is the ticket to the middle class.

Hardened terrorists are coming here to hit us hard if we don't hit them first.

I think Republicans will not win again in my lifetime ... unless they become a new GOP, a new Republican Party. And it has to be a transformation. Not a little tweaking at the edges.

I don't think I'm really open to having Washington change me.

I think [Donald Trump] has to do everything he can to set up a firewall between him and his businesses. But I think it's unrealistic for people to be saying, oh, he should just sell all of his businesses.

During the Great Depression African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights, but they became impatient for economic emancipation.

Inherent to socialism is the absence of choice. If I want to choose my own pretzels or books or iphones, they prevent me - they fine me, or imprison me. And those systems, not infrequently have historically, have developed into systems where there are pogroms.

I think my dad has helped me tremendously.

I don't think it's so much Trump lobbing us for changes. It's us asking him for help in getting the changes done. I think Trump has the bully pulpit. He has a great deal of influence with the Republican Party on both the House and the Senate side. The bill right now to the conservative point of view doesn't have enough repeal. It looks like we're keeping a lot of Obamacare. So we actually think that there needs to be more repeal. That's the message I took to Trump.

And when the time is right, I hope that African Americans will again look to the party of emancipation, civil liberty, and individual freedom.

I really think that discrimination and racism is a horrible thing. And I don't want any form of it in our government, in our public sphere.

I would have handled it differently than the mayor of Baltimore, that's for sure. I think it's a mistake to say, hey, guys, you can pillage the city for a while and we'll let that go, and we'll be sort of standing back. I think it's also important to know some of the underlying causes of why there's unease in our country.

How would you possibly sell 700 companies in a fire sale and hope to get what they were worth?It's just an unrealistic sort of standard they're trying to hold [Donald Trump] to.