A democracy thrives on diversity. Tyranny oppresses it.
Sam Brownback
I don't think there should be more gun control. I think there should be more education.
One of the greatest gifts God ever gave to humanity was that of liberty. We love freedom and bloom under it. We cannot and should not try to force people to live by a certain religious code. To do so negates our free will.
The right to keep and bear arms is a right that Kansans hold dear. The people of Kansas have repeatedly and overwhelmingly reaffirmed their commitment to protecting this fundamental right.
I do a number of things working on human rights issues, prison recidivism rates, and then I also push and have worked a lot on the social issues of rebuilding the family.
Unborn children do not have a voice, but they are young members of the human family. It is time to look at the unborn child, and recognize that it is really a young human, who can feel pain and should be treated with care.
I believe in the sanctity of marriage.
I love Canada. Canada is a great neighbour. Canada has been a great friend and neighbor for many, many years.
I voted yes for ANWR, and I would support those in other places, environmentally sound.
I went to law school with a plan of going back home and practicing law to support my farming, and Dad said, 'There's just not room here for us.' So I took off to practice law and got involved in some politics, and the rest just moved on forward.
The next president needs to know foreign policy and not learn it on the job.
I still have a lot of judgmentalism in me, where I'd see somebody, and I just would, you know, I disagree with this person, and you kind of automatically cast them away. And even though you don't do anything physically, you don't say anything, but people get a real sense of your heart.
I support strongly the expansion of nuclear power because that is one of the key ways of getting electricity generated and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
As we consider the fast pace of scientific and technological progress in our modern world, we must not lose our moral compass and give way to 'free market eugenics'.
I strongly support an 'all-of-the-above' energy policy that includes additional development of wind, clean coal, and bio-fuels.
I'd pull my little brother on our motorcycle on an inner tube behind it. We would go fishing, we would hunt some, growing up.
Culture is more important than politics and government.
Frankly, one of the problems we have in the country is we're not forming enough families. And that is hurting our economic work, and it's hurting our economic projections, because the best place for a child is within a strong family unit.
At my core, what I think we need to do is to get the basics right again. We need to rebuild our family structure, stay away from redefining marriage, and stand by marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
An unlimited America was the vision for the nation set forth by our Founding Fathers. It is the vision enshrined in those two great charters of freedom: our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Many of America's most intractable problems stem from the fact that we have strayed from that vision - and lost direction.
My dad farmed, my granddad was a farmer. I wanted to be a farmer.
I've served on the International Relations Committee.
I went to a number of foreign countries, and during whenever I went, I would try to go to an orphanage or a home for children. And I was seeing thousands of kids around the world that needed homes.
I want to expand the compassionate conservative agenda. I believe life begins in the womb, and we should protect it. But it extends to a child in Darfur or someone living in poverty.
My faith informs everything I think and do. It's part of my value system.
Consider this: The United States held its first presidential election in 1789. It marked the first peaceful transfer of executive power between parties in the fourth presidential election in 1801, and it took another 200 years' worth of presidential elections before the courts had to settle an election.
None of us takes amending the Constitution lightly. The plain fact is this amendment has been exhaustively studied and it really is time to act.
The moral argument is that we give big business a huge tax break, and why do we do it? To get their jobs.
Beijing, much as it has done with Hong Kong, persists in equating 'people power' with instability.
I do think the Obama agenda is the furthest left agenda we've seen since probably LBJ and the Great Society. And the differences have been that instead of him trying to go center-left, he's gone - in my estimation - more left. He's shown the country a much more aggressive liberal, more European style agenda, and that's on a center-right country.
I want to make it to Heaven and be as good an influence on others as I can in that process.
Let's create a legal system that can work.
I think the United Nations is a useful format to discuss matters, but I think it's a weak institution in being able to carry out matters and, in many respects even, it has been harmful on things like human rights.
Along with Senator Lieberman and others, I introduced the Energy Security Bill to use existing technologies with a variety of tax incentives to reduce our dependence on oil.
There is a disturbing reincarnation of socialist and nationalist dictatorships raising their heads around the world and even in our own back yard. You see it in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, stoked in no small part by Cuba, and also in Central Asia, and troubling trends in Russia and China.
The Founding Fathers of our nation believed in the people. They created a new nation based on the radical notion that the people could be free and trusted - that the nation would be great if you trusted the people to be good.
It is time for the government of China to stop holding innocent religious figures in captivity merely for peacefully protesting China's occupation of Tibet.
Today, as we look back on the history of our nation and take note of how far we have come as a people, we are reminded that we owe a great debt to those who fought valiantly for the freedoms that we easily take for granted.
We must do everything we can to be more aggressive in confronting Syria about what they are doing in Iraq.
We must take proactive steps to promote democracy and human rights abroad.
I think we just need to stick to our knitting on the topics and the subjects the American people care about.
This is a bipartisan effort. This is just good common sense. This is where the public wants us to go. They want us to not be so dependent on foreign oil.
Everybody will say that they're not opposed to immigration; they're opposed to illegal immigration. That's what I'm saying.
Immigration is a volatile issue, but we're in the middle of it now, and probably the worst thing to do is to not do anything. Everybody recognizes the current system is not working the way we want it to work. It has huge flaws to it; need to do something.
I do think there's a lot more we can do on the life agenda.
What I find is most people have a civics book understanding for how Congress works and how a bill moves.
Dick Durbin's a worthy opponent on any debate. He's very intelligent, quick. Knows his facts and puts them forward well.
I enjoyed working with Ted Kennedy.
I always think that the party that offers the most hope and ideas for the future is the party that wins.
I think the next president needs to lead on cultural issues and experience, particularly on foreign policy.
