Top 558 Quotes & Sayings by Rand Paul - Page 6

I will not vote to send my sons, or your sons, daughters, brothers, sisters or friends to fight for a stalemate.

I think most people, in their lifetime, have seen somebody who has the ability to use force lord it over other individuals. I see a lot of those videos, and I am disturbed by people being yanked out of their cars, and it seems to be a disproportionate amount of young black men. I'm disturbed by it.

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.

Cut defense spending as part of cutting all federal spending.

I never, ever cheated [in medical school]. I don't condone cheating. But I would sometimes spread misinformation. This is a great tactic. Misinformation can be very important.

So if we announce we're going to have a no-fly zone, and others have said this. Hillary Clinton is also for it. It is a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for World War III. We need to confront Russia from a position of strength, but we don't need to confront Russia from a point of recklessness that would lead to war.

The president wants more tax money in Washington. I want more money left in the communities, particularly poor communities, particularly communities that have high unemployment.

As our voices rise in protest, the NSA monitors your every phone call. if you have a cell phone, you are under surveillance. I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damn business.

I have allowed the president to pick his political appointees…But I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution.

My goal right now is to actually help Donald Trump. He's the Republican president. He's doing a lot of things that conservatives are for. I'm for. And so my goal is to help Kentucky by repealing regulations that are killing our coal industry. And I think on that, we're very much aligned.

I really think that discrimination and racism is a horrible thing. And I don't want any form of it in our government, in our public sphere.

What worries me most about Trump, other than all of the other crazy things, is that I believe that he wants power and I believe from my point of view that power corrupts, and that the whole purpose of our founding fathers and America was to contain power.

If there were an ounce of courage in this body I would be joined by other senators… saying they will not tolerate this.

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

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 think if we want to defeat terrorism, I think if we truly are sincere about defeating terrorism, we need to quit arming the allies of ISIS. If we want to defeat terrorism, the boots on the ground - the boots on the ground need to be Arab boots on the ground.

Secretary [John] Kerry has called Civil War [in Syria] an unbelievably small war that we're going to get involved with.

I say the phone records of law abiding citizens are none of their damn business!

I believe people ought to be treated fairly under the law. I see no reason why if the marriage contract conveys certain things that if you want to marry another woman that you can do that and have a contract. But the thing is is the religious connotation of marriage that has been going on for thousands of years, I still want to preserve that. And you probably could have both. You could have both traditional marriage, which I believe in. And then you could also have the neutrality of the law that allows people to have contracts with another.

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

The vast majority of my time is traveling and talking about the issues. It isn't really calling and asking for money.

We live in a world, a medieval type of world, where someone can accuse you - through gossip and hearsay, and all of a sudden you're supposed to respond to specific charges from people you don't know, are not aware of who these people are, and you're supposed to respond to their specific allegations?

You can tell a person's religion 85 percent of the time from their phone records.

I was told I got 10 measly minutes, but just in case, I brought 13 hours worth of material.

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.

Roll back federal spending to 2008 levels.

Are you so afraid that you are willing to trade your freedom for security?

How much liberty do with want to give up for a false sense of security?

The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed - socialism doesn't work.

[Marco] Rubio says we should collect all Americans' records all of the time. The Constitution says otherwise. I think they're both wrong. I think we defeat terrorism by showing them that we do not fear them.

I'm a Reagan conservative. Reagan did negotiate with the Soviets. But you have to negotiate from a position of strength.

I worry that the Senate is working to consider a series of little-noticed provisions in comprehensive immigration reform that may provide a pathway to a national ID card for all individuals present in the United States - citizens and noncitizens.

Unless you really stand for something, people aren't motivated to go out and vote for you.

I will continue to fight for legislation that forces Congress to read the bills! I will fight for a vote on my bill that calls for a waiting period for each page of legislation. I will continue to object when Congress sticks special interest riders on bills in the dead of night! And if Congress refuses to obey its own rules, if Congress refuses to pass a budget, if Congress refuses to read the bills, then I say: Sweep the place clean. Limit their terms and send them home!

I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.

I think it's a little premature to talk about response until we know exactly what happened, but we should know what happened. And we should know how to defend [against hackers attacks] ourselves without question.

I don't like the idea of telling private business owners. I abhor racism. I think it's a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant. But at the same time I do believe in private ownership. I think there should be absolutely no discrimination in anything that gets public funding.

If we believe [Obama] to be a good man who would never kill noncombatants in a cafe in Houston, sitting out in a sidewalk cafe, smoking - oh, that's right you're not allowed to smoke cigarettes anymore.

The greatest threat to our national security is our debt. We borrow a million dollars a minute.

When I asked the president [Barack Obama], can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It's an easy question. It should have been a resounding and unequivocal no. The president's response, he hasn't killed anyone yet.

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.'

President Obama, I think, wanted what was best for the country, but I think it didn't work well. I think we have the death spiral, and I think particularly premiums in the individual market are going through the roof. Republicans want what's best for the country, but I think they're not fixing the death spiral of Obamacare. They're going to subsidize it with a lot of taxpayer money. So, characterizing something as mean or generous I think goes to people's motives, and I think it is sort of why we have such an angry country now. We think that people have ill motives.

The GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered. I don't think we need to name any names, do we? Our party is encumbered by an inconsistent approach to freedom. The new GOP will need to embrace liberty in both the economic and the personal sphere.

You can not be a conservative if you're going to keep promoting new programs that you're not going to pay for.

It is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.

You can send a clear message to the establishment

Well, I think a handshake is something that honorable men do. Before we had contracts we had handshakes that expressed that we were making an arrangement that was based on our honor. And I don't think I can shake the hand of someone who shows and lacks honor by attacking a man's faith.

I'm here in Whoopi Goldberg's office trying to choose some shoes. We've seen [Marco] Rubio has those cool new boots and I don't want to be outdone.

You have to decide in advance whether you're ready go to war. If you guys are ready to send a million troops into Ukraine and fight World War III, you're going to do it without my support because I think that's a really foolish notion.

The coarsening of our culture towards violent death has more consequences than war. Tragically, this same culture has led to the death of 50 million unborn children in the last 40 years. I don't think a civilization can long endure that does not have respect for all human life, born and not yet born. I believe there will come a time when we are all judged on whether or not we took a stand in defense of all life from the moment of conception until our last natural breath.

As commander-in-chief, I will do whatever it takes to defend America. But in defending America, we cannot lose what America stands for.

I think the vast majority of the American people say you shouldn't be able to collect my phone records if I'm not suspicious, if you don't have probable cause.

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.

The insurance companies make about $15 billion a year. They have doubled their profit margin under Obamacare. And so now we're going to take a lot of this and call it a stabilization fund, but really it's a bailout of insurance companies. And I just think that's wrong. I just can't see why ordinary, average taxpayers would be giving money to very, very wealthy corporations. An analogous situation would be this: We all complain that new cars cost too much. Why don't we have a new car stabilization fund and give $130 billion to car companies?

Right now in the insurance markets, we have sort of a disaster unfolding, a downward spiral, adverse selection, premiums in the individual market going through the roof. People can't afford insurance and insurance companies are losing hundreds of millions of dollars. If you repeal part of Obamacare to get rid of the individual mandate but keep some of the ideas, that people can still buy insurance after they're sick, the situation gets extraordinarily worse. And so what we're seeing now could be tenfold greater if you only repeal part of Obamacare.

Toppling secular dictators in the Middle East has only led to chaos and the rise of radical Islam.

During the Great Depression African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights, but they became impatient for economic emancipation.

To me, there is no greater threat than our debt. I'm the only fiscal conservative on the stage because I'm willing to hold the line on all spending.

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.

If there are few conservatives in the senate wing of the Republican Party that will say no to a budget that never balances, we could have the power to say to the leadership, you know what, need a better budget.