Top 558 Quotes & Sayings by Rand Paul - Page 9

Our intervention to destabilize the Assad regime has really made the chaos worse in Syria. And if you were to get rid of Assad today, I would actually worry about the 2 million Christians that are protected by Assad.

I still say exactly what my original opinion is. Do you borrow money from China to send it to anyone? Out of your surplus, you can help your allies, and Israel is a great ally. And this is no particular animus of Israel, but what I will say, and I will say over and over again, we cannot give away money we don't have.

The current budget that the Republicans are looking at never balances. How can that be fiscally responsible? And how can we look at the public with a straight face and say yes we ran on balanced budgets.

The idea of foreign policy realism, I think, fits more neatly with President Trump. And with John McCain, the neoconservative label of let's make the world safe for democracy and we're going to topple every regime hasn't worked.

I think Saudi Arabia often finances radical Islam and the teaching of hatred to the West and hatred of Americans. I think it is important that we know that. It's important that we know that there is a threat within and a threat without. I think we can stop it with more aggressive use of actual constitutional tools.

I have a great deal of concern for any president and the amount of power they accumulate versus congress. I'm a stickler about the idea of separation of powers.

My worry now is that many people are talking about a partial repeal of Obamacare. If you only repeal part of it and you leave if some sort of Obamacare light, which some are talking about, my fear is the situation actually gets worse.

I would have never released the sanctions [for Iran] before there was consistent evidence of compliance.

When we toppled [Muammar] Gadhafi in Libya, I think that was a mistake. I think ISIS grew stronger, we had a failed state, and we were more at risk.

I think what we've had in the past is the government has said, "Well, we need to collect the whole haystack." And the haystack is Americans' privacy. Every Americans' privacy. We have to give up all of our privacy.

If you are accused of being associated with terrorism, which could mean you are an Arab- American and you've sent e-mails to a relative in the Middle East, you should get your day in court, and I think you should get a lawyer and a trial, and I think most Americans agree to that.

The key to winning any general election in the USA is to excite your base and then expand your base - get independent voters and voters who haven't been voting for your party to come to your party.

The people who get the ability to use force have to be watched carefully by civilians to make sure they don't use it excessively.

I think those who have wanted regime [of Bashar Assad] change have made a mistake.

I went to my first national convention in 1976, when my family supported [Ronald] Reagan over [Gerald] Ford, so we've always been Republicans, but we've always wanted the Republican Party to be the party of fiscally conservative, limited-government types. And I think, sometimes, we haven't done that as well.

To put everyone in government housing and food stamps and bring them in from around the world I think is a mistake. To give of your own money, I've given to my church. My church has helped people that came from Bosnia. That's a good thing.

Currently, the United States has troops in dozens of countries and is actively fighting in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen (with the occasional drone strike in Pakistan). In addition, the United States is pledged to defend 28 countries in NATO. It is unwise to expand the monetary and military obligations of the United States given the burden of our $20 trillion debt.

Is Donald Trump a serious candidate? The reason I ask this is, if you're going to close the Internet, realize, America, what that entails. That entails getting rid of the First amendment, ok? It's no small feat.

Any time we give people the ability to use force, we have to be very careful. It's sort of like the people who spy on us - you've got to watch the watchers.

I've thought for some time that the answer to a lot of problems in the Middle East, including Iran, include an active role with Russia. And I think, in some ways, we've taken show votes in the U.N. that are guaranteed to failure before we take them.

I'm in favor of everything with regards to ending institutional racism.

I would have handled it differently than the mayor of Baltimore, that's for sure. I think it's a mistake to say, hey, guys, you can pillage the city for a while and we'll let that go, and we'll be sort of standing back. I think it's also important to know some of the underlying causes of why there's unease in our country.

We still need to secure our southern border. The other thing I would say is we need to secure who visits us in the country.

What my bill would do would be only for refugees going forward. So I haven't taken a position on sending anyone home. But I have taken the position that we have a lot of problems here in our country. And that one of the things that we do - charity is about giving your own money. Charity isn't giving someone else's money.

I think we ought to quit sending [help] to countries that burn our flag.

What I can say is, is that if you do a poll, and one of the worldwide polling companies did this, and they asked people in 50 countries, "Would you like to come to America," it's about 700 million would come next year. We would double our population.

If you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realize that there's something called the Geneva Convention we're going to have to pull out of. It would defy every norm that is America.

This flirtation with isolationism in the Republican party is over. It's giving way to a more muscular foreign policy than I've been advocating. But I'm also advocating building up others. Build a small schoolhouse in Afghanistan to help a poor young girl have a say about her children will destroy the ideology more than a bomb.

When you ask yourself, whoever you are, that think you're going to support Donald Trump, think, do you believe in the Constitution? Are you going to change the Constitution?

I'm a different kind of Republican. I've introduced a five-year balanced budget. I've introduced the largest tax cut in our history. I stood for ten and a half hours on the Senate floor to defend your right to be left alone. But I've also gone to Chicago. I've gone to Detroit. I've been to Ferguson, I've been to Baltimore, because I want our party to be bigger, better and bolder...

I think we're never fully protected, but I think we need to do everything we can to stop threats to us.

I love the Mexican people; I respect the Mexican leaders - but the leaders are much sharper, smarter and more cunning than our [American] leaders.

I don't think we're actually using the constitutional tools that we have in an appropriate fashion.

I would prefer the [USA] government to be the policeman and not the businessman.

We have 11 million people said to be in our country illegally. Forty percent of them are said to have overstayed their visa. Do we know where they are?

There's 150,000 students here from the Middle East. If 40% of them have overstayed their visa, don't we need to know where they are, what they're doing, are they obeying our rules?

If Senator Rubio were doing his job and in Congress more, he might know that the program 'phone records of a potential terrorist cause' continues. It's been ongoing for the last six months. So the Paris tragedy, this tragedy happened while we were still doing bulk collection, all bulk collection. Also in France, they have a program a thousand-fold more invasive, collecting all of the data of all of the French.

People who want to come to this country don't have constitutional rights. Once they get here, they do. But coming here is not a constitutional right. So with do, as a nation, have the ability and should have the ability to decide who comes here and when they come here.

I think it's a real debate how big NATO should be and whether or not it's more provocative than good. Whenever there's a war fought, our soldiers fight it and our dollars pay for it. And, really, our decisions need to be about our national security.

The fundamental problem of Obamacare is the insurance mandates. When you mandate what has to be insurance, it elevates the price. And when you tell people they can buy insurance after they're sick, they will. And you get what's called adverse selection.

I think we have a Tea Party mandate, and that Tea Party mandate is for good-government type of things, things like term limits, things like a balanced budget amendment, things like read the bills for goodness sakes, things like that maybe Congress should only pass legislation that they apply to themselves as well.

I think it's a huge mistake. I think regime change in Syria, and this is what - I've been saying this for several years now. In 2013 when we first went in, I said, you are going to give arms to the allies of al Qaida, to radical jihadists? That's crazy.

In a reality, what we should be doing is having quiet diplomacy with the Russians to convince them that it's in their self-interest to have a more stable Middle East because trade enriches us all.

Al Qaeda has been placed on the run, but not destroyed.

ISIL is not the JV team. I cannot stress enough that there's a terrorist army in Syria and Iraq that wants to attack the homeland and we're not doing anything about it. So how do you defeat the ideology? Build up others? You reject Rand Paul.

I'm an internationalist. I want to help others, not just kill terrorists.

The government has investigated our program of collecting through a generalized fashion, everyone's phone records in the country. And they found that no terrorist case has been thwarted through this.

There was a conservative consensus for an amendment I put forward called Trust, But Verify that would have strengthened border security on both refugees, students and those coming here. And Marco sided and I guess was more sympathetic to Chuck Schumer and to the president than he was to conservative principles.

I think you'll find that these are measures that have great bipartisan support, and so I expect, not only did we do well in the primary, I think we'll win by a wide margin in the fall because we're going to get a lot of independents and conservative Democrats coming to us.

When the government tries to invade the church to enforce its own opinion on [gay] marriage, that's when it's time to resist.

I think there's evil on both sides [of Syria], and I think that's one reason I don't want to be involved in civil war. I see things in personal terms. I just can't see sending one of my sons - or your son or daughter - to fight in a civil war, where on one side we have a dictator, who in all likelihood gassed his people.

I think there's a racial outcome to a lot of what goes in America, but I don't think race is always the reason.

I think that we have to be very careful about who comes here from the Middle East.

I've introduced legislation to say, "For right now, let's stop it," from about 34 countries.

If Americans were attacked, it does change the equation. The problem is, is that with regard to this is there've been horrendous killings of civilians with conventional weapons.

I'm the leading voice in America for not arming the allies of ISIS.

The question is, how do we keep America safe from terrorism? [Donald]Trump says we ought to close that Internet thing. The question really is, what does he mean by that? Like they do in North Korea? Like they do in China?

We have Islamic rebels [in Syria] who've been eating the hearts or organs of their enemies. We have priests that have been killed. We have Christian villages that have been razed by Islamic rebels. We have Islamic rebels who say they don't recognize Israel and would just as soon attack Israel as [Bashar] Assad. So really, I see no clear-cut American interest, and I'm afraid that sometimes things unravel, and the situation could become less stable and not more stable.

I would pay to have those adjudications enrolled into the federal background system so we could detect people who are mentally ill before they buy a gun. That is a real problem.

I think there is some overreach in the sense that the EPA now says: if Congress doesn't pass greenhouse emissions regulations or testing, we'll simply do it on our own. I think that's an arrogance of a regulatory body run amok.