Rand Paul
The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.Collection: Children
You either believe in the Constitution, or you don't.Collection: Believe
We have to think before we act.Collection: Thinking
Inherent to socialism is the absence of choice. If I want to choose my own pretzels or books or iphones, they prevent me - they fine me, or imprison me. And those systems, not infrequently have historically, have developed into systems where there are pogroms.Collection: Book
The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the Cold War, is that the engine of capitalism - the individual - is mightier than any collective.Collection: War
There comes a time, there comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now and I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts go unchallenged.Collection: Suffering
I do believe people ought to be left alone. I don't care who you are or what you do at home or who your friends are or where you hang out, what kind of music you listen to, what you do in your home is your own business. That's always been who I am. I am a leave me alone kind of guy.Collection: Believe
I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.Collection: Children
We should be proud that so many want to come to America, that it is still seen as the land of opportunity. Let's make it a land of legal work, not black-market jobs. Let's make it a land of work, not welfare. Our land should be one of assimilation, not hiding in the shadows.Collection: Jobs
We are borrowing $40,000 per second.Collection: Borrowing
I've put pencil to paper... and I've said I would cut spending, and I've said exactly where. Each one of my budgets has taken a meat axe to foreign aid, because I think we ought to quit sending it to countries that hate us.Collection: Country
If I were to look at foreign policy, I would say John McCain has been wrong on just about everything over the last four decades.Collection: Looks
If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party they're contagious and you can catch it from them.Collection: Party
President Obama said, oh, we want to make insurance perfect for people, but he added all these regulatory mandates, made it too expensive. Young, healthy people didn't buy it, and the people remaining in the insurance pool were sicker and sicker. That's the adverse selection and the death spiral of Obamacare. And so really we do need to discuss the intricacies of what worked and what didn't work in Obamacare. And I think the better way to do this is to let individuals have the freedom to choose what kind of insurance is best for them. The government doesn't always know best.Collection: Thinking
I hate that Mosul is falling, but I also think that for 10 years we have supplied the Iraqis and they can't stand up and do anything to defend their country, and it is all up to us?Collection: Country
I think we've made the collection haystack so big, no one's ever getting through the haystack to find the needle. What we really need to do is isolate the haystack into a group of suspicious people and spend enormous resources looking at suspicious people, people who we have probable cause.Collection: Thinking
Our legislative victory - an end to earmarks.Collection: Victory
I think it's a conundrum. If we have no laws on this, people take it to one extension further, does it have to be humans, you know?Collection: Thinking
I think Republicans will not win again in my lifetime ... unless they become a new GOP, a new Republican Party. And it has to be a transformation. Not a little tweaking at the edges.Collection: Party
You don't know who the next group is that's unpopular. The Bill of Rights isn't for the prom queen. The bill of rights isn't for the high school quarterback. The Bill of Rights is for the least among us. The Bill of Rights is for minorities. The Bill of Rights is for those who have minority opinions.Collection: Queens
How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, how did that party become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote?Collection: Party
Any time someone tries to tell you that metadata is 'meaningless, don't worry, it's just who you call, it's just phone records, it's not a big deal' - realize we kill people based on metadata. So they must be pretty darn certain that they think they know something based on metadata.Collection: Thinking
Well, there’s 10 - there’s 10 different - there’s 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions. And I’m absolutely in favor of one deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that.Collection: Rights
On vague wording of drone strike criteria: “Are you going to just drop a hellfire missile on Jane Fonda? Are you going to drop a missile on Kent State? That’s gobbledygook.Collection: Drones
Should it be prohibited for private entities such as a church, bed and breakfast or retirement neighborhood that doesn't want noisy children? Absolutely not.Collection: Retirement
I'm not opposed to letting people work and labor in our country, but we shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship. We're the only country I know of where a person can come in illegally and that baby becomes a citizen and I think that should stop also.Collection: Country
I do not yet know if I will find a Romney presidency more acceptable on foreign policy. But I do know that I must oppose the most recent statements made by Mitt Romney in which he says he, as president, could take us to war unilaterally with Iran, without any approval from Congress.Collection: War
Gun control is not part of a strategy to defeat radical Islam or take ISIL down. However it is a problem back here at home. A million people have been adjudicated a danger to themselves or to others at the state court level.Collection: Home
The source of the problem is in Syria. Raqqa is the headquarters of ISIL, which is a lethal terrorist organization, now army. If you don't go after them over there, they're going to hit us over here, and there's no substitute for that in my view.Collection: Army
The other thing I said is the great irony is you will be back fighting against your own weapons. Had [Bashar] Assad been bombed when he used chemical weapons two years ago, ISIS would be in charge of all of Syria now.Collection: Fighting
Whether or not regime change is a good idea or a bad idea. I don't think because I think the regime change was a bad idea it means that Hussein was necessarily a good idea.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Light
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?Collection: Country
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.Collection: Real
I think we're never fully protected, but I think we need to do everything we can to stop threats to us.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Obamacare
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Country
I've introduced legislation to say, "For right now, let's stop it," from about 34 countries.Collection: Country
I think that we have to be very careful about who comes here from the Middle East.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Mistake