I have no permanent enemies - only people I have yet to persuade.

I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women's movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.

I think modern societies have to ask a very basic question: What strategies buy the most health for people? Doctors can do so many marvelous things now. They can keep a corpse alive, almost.

We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation.

Amnesty is a big billboard, a flashing billboard, to the rest of the world that we don't really mean our immigration law.

The biggest challenge of public policy is to know when and how the world has changed. We are no longer an empty continent with endless absorptive capacity. We have a cash-wage economy that is having terrible problems finding jobs for its own people. The concern about immigration is not nativism but common sense.

I think that retiring the baby boomers is going to be one of the great challenges in America, that you cannot make fiscal sense out of the future of our children without taking on entitlements.