One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.

All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.

Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.

Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.

Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.