What many of the Senate Democrats are taking as the lesson of this election was that Hillary Clinton is too moderate and they need to go more Elizabeth Warren, more Bernie Sanders, more extreme and on the fringes.

We have 400,000 small businesses forming every year in this country. How great is that? They are employing themselves, they are potentially employing others. The bad news is, we have 470,000 going out of business every year. And why? They cite Obamacare.

I'll tell you whose view on [Bashar] Assad is the same as mine. It's Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said Israel doesn't have a dog in that fight because Assad is a puppet of Iran, a Shia radical Islamic terrorist, but at the same time, Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't want to see Syria governed by ISIS.

I'm very proud to have joined with conservatives in both the Senate and the House to reform how we target bad guys.

I'm not serving in office because I desperately needed 99 new friends in the U.S. Senate. Given the choice between being reviled in Washington, DC, and appreciated in Texas, or reviled in Texas and appreciated in Washington, I would take the former 100 out of 100 times.

Fifty-five years ago, when my dad was a penniless teenager, thank God some well-meaning bureaucrat didn't put his arm around him and say let me take care of you.

Popularity isn't the end-all, be-all. What matters far more is that you stick to your principles, that you stand up and you live a life of integrity.