Rand paul quotes

We have to think before we act.

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

When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury - national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture - we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.

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.

American inventiveness and the desire to build developed because we were guaranteed the right to own our success.

What I've always said is that I'm opposed to institutional racism, and I would've, had I've been alive at the time, I think, had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, and I see no place in our society for institutional racism.

[John] Bolton is so far out there, he`s advocating bombing everyone in the world.

Do we fear terrorism so much that we throw out our Constitution, and are we unwilling and afraid to debate our Constitution?

The problem or the fundamental flaw of Obamacare was that they put regulations on the insurance, about 12 regulations, which increased the cost of the insurance. And so President Obama wanted to help poor, working-class people, but he actually hurts them by making the insurance too expensive to want to buy. I had someone at the house just recently was doing some work, and he said: "Oh, my son doesn't have insurance, he's paying the penalty because it's too expensive."

[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.

The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.

For liberty to expand, government must shrink. For the economy to grow, government must get out of the way.

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.

I'm not someone who's sort of still trying to figure out what I believe in.

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.

I think women have come a long way. Women are in positions not because they're women, they're in positions because they're intelligent and they should be equal to their counterparts and treated equally.

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.

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.

I’m not for profiling people on the color of their skin or on their religion. But I would take into account where they've been traveling and perhaps you might indirectly have to take into account whether or not they've been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn't be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after. They should be deported or put in prison.

No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never wavered in my support for civil rights or the civil rights act.

The Republican Party is an empty vessel unless we imbue it with values.

We shouldn't be fearful of freedom, we shouldn't be fearful of individual liberty.

The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.

You either believe in the Constitution, or you don't.

If you think you have the right to health care, you are saying basically that I am your slave. I provide health care... My staff and technicians provide it... If you have a right to health care, then you have a right to their labor.

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.

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.

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

You know, when Republicans were in charge, we doubled the debt. But, now, our concern is the Democrats are in charge and they're tripling the debt. So, really, our concern is that we want smaller government.

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

If you give up your rights now, don’t expect to get them back.

If you're white and you're rich in the USA, if you get busted for drugs, you get a good attorney, and you in all likelihood serve no time. But if you're poor, black, Hispanic, or poor and white for that matter, you can get put in jail.

The Stamp Act was a direct tax imposed on the colonies by King George III. This act inevitably led to the American Revolution. Just as the Stamp Act did in 1765, Obamacare should act as a wake-up call. Chief Justice Roberts provides us with a similar call to action.

It's curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you're saving money.

Congress shall pass no law that exempts themselves!

Any time you make an analogy to horrific people in history, Mussolini or Hitler, people say, 'Oh, you're exaggerating, you're talking about, it's hyperbole.' Maybe it is. ... But I would say is that if you are not concerned that democracy could produce bad people, I don't think you're really thinking this through too much.

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.

There is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street. Likewise, there is nothing progressive about billion dollar loans to millionaires to build solar panels.

If you force legislators to balance, at the end of the day, if it has to be balanced, then they step up and they become legislators and can find out where to cut.

I call myself a constitutional conservative.

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.

The First Amendment says keep government out of religion. It doesn't say keep religion out of government.

Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

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

The Founders never intended for Americans to trust their government. Our entire Constitution was predicated on the notion that government was a necessary evil, to be restrained and minimized as much as possible.

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!

You can't have it both ways. You can't tell me that you're taxed enough already, and that you want constitutional government and then in the next breath say, 'Bring me home some bacon.' The pig has been picked clean.

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.

You need to have people within your own party that have the wherewithal to stand up to you.

I have a question, a question for the president: Do you hate all rich people, or just rich people who don't contribute to your campaign? Do you hate poor people or do you just hate poor people with jobs?

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.

If I have a weakness, it's that I try to live by the rules. I try to live by the rules, no matter what they are, and I was brought up that way as a kid. Play by the rules.

I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government.

You campaigned against rich people and you got enough envy whipped up in the country and you're gonna get 'em. You're gonna stick it to those rich people. But guess what? You may not get anymore revenue. You may not get anymore economic growth. But you can say, 'I stuck it to the rich people.'

The main thing I say on war is that we need to obey the law and formally declare war.

The Constitution was not written to restrain the citizen's behavior, it was writtne to restrain the government's behavior.

Cut defense spending as part of cutting all federal spending.

Every child in every neighborhood, of every color, class and background, deserves a school that will help them succeed.

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?

In battle, combatants engaged in war against America get no due process and may lawfully be killed. But citizens not in a battlefield - however despicable - are guaranteed a trial by our Constitution. No one argues that Americans who commit treason shouldn't be punished. The maximum penalty for treason is death. But the Constitution specifies the process necessary to convict.

Fear & complacency allow power to accumulate & liberty & privacy to suffer

And when the time is right, I hope that African Americans will again look to the party of emancipation, civil liberty, and individual freedom.

There comes a time, in the history of Nations when fear and forgetfulness cause a nation to hesitate, to waver and perhaps even to succumb. When that time comes those who love liberty must rise to the occasion. Will you? Will you lovers of liberty, will you rise to the occasion?

In a free society we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we're civilized people we publicly criticize that and don't belong to those groups or associate with those people.

I'll tell you what a weakness is of this country [the USA]: there are a lot of people who are sick and tired because Washington does not play by the same rules that the American people have to play by.

The Republican promise is for policies that create economic growth. Republicans believe lower taxes, less regulation, balanced budgets, a solvent Social Security and Medicare will stimulate economic growth.

Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

My great grandfather, like many, came to this country in search of the American Dream.

The U.S. should never get involved where we have no clear national interest. We should not intervene militarily in a country like Syria, where we can’t separate friend from foe and might end up arming the very people who hate us the most.

No president has the right to say he is judge, jury and executioner.

We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

If congress refuses to obey its own rules. If congress refuses to pass a balanced budget. If congress refuses to read the Bills. Then I say, sweep the place clean, limit their terms, and send them HOME!

It's a little different when you spend 30 years developing all these companies that we just ask [Donald Trump] to sell them. So I don't think that's a fair request.

We are borrowing $40,000 per second.

We don't need bigger government. We need to shrink the size of government.

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

I don't plan on being bashful.

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

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.

You can send a clear message to the establishment

All issues of crime are better addressed at the state level.

We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people, so just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let's not punish anyone.

The only way to save Social Security is to raise the retirement age.

If our freedom is taken, the American dream will wither and die.

If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party they're contagious and you can catch it from them.

We have a lot of politicians who have really small brains and really big hearts.

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

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.

I've heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.

We should not have the U.S. government buying stock in American industries - the financial industry or any other industry.

The money in the stabilization fund, $130 billion which I call an insurance bailout, is put in to try to cure the adverse selection that Obamacare created by making insurance too expensive. Healthy people didn't buy it. They tried to fix this by forcing young people to buy it through an individual mandate. Even that didn't work. So the way the Republicans fix it is they don't actually fix it. They subsidize it. So we have to fix what went wrong with Obamacare, not just recapitulate something that's broken.

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.

Bipartisanship is not what is missing in Washington. Common sense is.

America's not the world's policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.

Washington is horribly broken. We are encountering a day of reckoning and this movement, this Tea Party movement, is a message to Washington that we're unhappy and that we want things done differently.

I think we need to treat everybody with dignity.

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.

You know, you look at term limits, you poll term limits, 70, 80 percent of Republicans or Democrats are for it.

Using taxes to punish the rich, in reality, punishes everyone because we are all interconnected. High taxes and excessive regulation and massive debt are not working.

I would introduce and support legislation to send Roe v. Wade back to the states.

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

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

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.

I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat, there is something profoundly un-American about using the brute force of government to bully someone.

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.

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?

We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was rushed to the floor. Several hundred pages. Nobody read it ... But people voted because they were fearful and people said there could be another attack and Americans will blame me if I don't vote on this.

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.

I read all of Ayn Rand's novels when I was 17.

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.

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

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

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.

What I say is, national defense is the most important thing we do in Washington, but there's still waste in the military budget.

We will not cut one penny from the safety net until we've cut every penny from corporate welfare.

The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible - the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets.

Let's means-test benefits - let's means-test Social Security and Medicare and make the rich pay more for these benefits.

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

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.

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

I'm not in favor of any discrimination of any form.

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.

I am encouraged President Obama now says he will fulfill his constitutional obligation to seek authorization for any potential military action in Syria. This is the most important decision any President or any Senator must make, and it deserves vigorous debate