Rand Paul Quotes

I love the Mexican people; I respect the Mexican leaders - but the leaders are much sharper, smarter and more cunning than our [American] leaders.

I think it's fair to point out that there is bias in the media on both sides, both right and left. And that it's very hard to find objective news because we have gotten, particularly as you watch cable news, it's so dominated by opinion.

There are still people - the majority on the stage, they want to topple [Bashar] Assad. And then there will be chaos, and I think ISIS will then be in charge of Syria.

The fundamental problem of Obamacare is the insurance mandates. When you mandate what has to be insurance, it elevates the price. And when you tell people they can buy insurance after they're sick, they will. And you get what's called adverse selection.

We have to think before we act.

The power to tax and spend is restricted by the enumerated powers.

I went to my first national convention in 1976, when my family supported [Ronald] Reagan over [Gerald] Ford, so we've always been Republicans, but we've always wanted the Republican Party to be the party of fiscally conservative, limited-government types. And I think, sometimes, we haven't done that as well.

American inventiveness and the desire to build developed because we were guaranteed the right to own our success.

What I can say is, is that if you do a poll, and one of the worldwide polling companies did this, and they asked people in 50 countries, "Would you like to come to America," it's about 700 million would come next year. We would double our population.

The other thing I said is the great irony is you will be back fighting against your own weapons. Had [Bashar] Assad been bombed when he used chemical weapons two years ago, ISIS would be in charge of all of Syria now.

I do believe people ought to be left alone. I don't care who you are or what you do at home or who your friends are or where you hang out, what kind of music you listen to, what you do in your home is your own business. That's always been who I am. I am a leave me alone kind of guy.

We need to get insurance out of the way and let the consumer interact with their doctor the way they did basically before World War II.

There comes a time, there comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now and I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts go unchallenged.

Out of regime change you get chaos. From the chaos you have seen repeatedly the rise of radical Islam. So we get this profession of, oh, my goodness, they want to do something about terrorism and yet they're the problem because they allow terrorism to arise out of that chaos.

I'm the third of five children.

We don't need bigger government. We need to shrink the size of government.

I think we defeat terrorism by showing them that we do not fear them.

I am encouraged President Obama now says he will fulfill his constitutional obligation to seek authorization for any potential military action in Syria. This is the most important decision any President or any Senator must make, and it deserves vigorous debate

I want to collect more records from terrorists, but less records from innocent Americans. The Fourth Amendment was what we fought the Revolution over! John Adams said it was the spark that led to our war for independence, and I'm proud of standing for the Bill of Rights, and I will continue to stand for the Bill of Rights.

I think we ought to quit sending [help] to countries that burn our flag.

You wonder why your government's completely broken? We lurch from deadline to deadline, and it's on purpose really. We do deadline to deadline because ... 'we've got to go. It's spring break, we're going to be late for spring break, and we've got to go, so we've got to finish this up before we go.'

We must protect ourselves from jihadis without losing ourselves.

After ensuring border security, I then would normalize the status of 11 million undocumented citizens so they can join the work force and pay taxes...I would normalize them at a rate of about two million per year.

I don't want my marriage or my guns registered in Washington.

I think we've made the collection haystack so big, no one's ever getting through the haystack to find the needle. What we really need to do is isolate the haystack into a group of suspicious people and spend enormous resources looking at suspicious people, people who we have probable cause.

I'll do anything to try to prevent John Bolton from getting any position, because I think his world view is naive. He believes we're going to spread democracy. We're going to topple governments everywhere and they're going to elect Thomas Jefferson. That's not the way it works in the Middle East.

Washington is horribly broken. We are encountering a day of reckoning and this movement, this Tea Party movement, is a message to Washington that we're unhappy and that we want things done differently.

Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.

The main thing I say on war is that we need to obey the law and formally declare war.

I hate that Mosul is falling, but I also think that for 10 years we have supplied the Iraqis and they can't stand up and do anything to defend their country, and it is all up to us?

You know, you look at term limits, you poll term limits, 70, 80 percent of Republicans or Democrats are for it.

According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, "He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They'd been smoking pot."

Using taxes to punish the rich, in reality, punishes everyone because we are all interconnected. High taxes and excessive regulation and massive debt are not working.

The Constitution was not written to restrain the citizen's behavior, it was writtne to restrain the government's behavior.

You can be strong without being involved in every single civil war around the world.

I think if we ban certain religions, if we censor the Internet, I think that at that point the terrorists will have won.

If you're white and you're rich in the USA, if you get busted for drugs, you get a good attorney, and you in all likelihood serve no time. But if you're poor, black, Hispanic, or poor and white for that matter, you can get put in jail.

I’ve never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on. If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and fifty dollars in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him.

We have Islamic rebels [in Syria] who've been eating the hearts or organs of their enemies. We have priests that have been killed. We have Christian villages that have been razed by Islamic rebels. We have Islamic rebels who say they don't recognize Israel and would just as soon attack Israel as [Bashar] Assad. So really, I see no clear-cut American interest, and I'm afraid that sometimes things unravel, and the situation could become less stable and not more stable.

Someone is an ignoramus who would say that, 'Oh, we had three hurricanes this year. This proves that somehow the climate is warming.' The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and you're going to say that we had four hurricanes and so it proves a theory?

To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.

You know, when Republicans were in charge, we doubled the debt. But, now, our concern is the Democrats are in charge and they're tripling the debt. So, really, our concern is that we want smaller government.

My goodness, what we want in a leader is someone with judgment, not someone who is so reckless as to stand on the stage and say, "Yes, I'm jumping up and down; I'm going to shoot down Russian planes." Russia already flies in that airspace. It may not be something we're in love with the fact that they're there, but they were invited by Iraq and by Syria to fly in that airspace.

I'm not someone who's sort of still trying to figure out what I believe in.

The president began this program by executive order. He should immediately end it by executive order. For over a year now, he has said the program is illegal, and yet he does nothing.

If I had been told to get out of the street as a teenager, there would have been a distinct possibility that I might have smarted off. But, I wouldn’t have expected to be shot.

The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.