Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't look at polls, I pay no attention to them. I pay attention to the public, and the sense of where the public is on certain things, but you have to lead.
You don't put an animal in the corner without the animal striking back, you don't put a politician in the corner and without them expecting to strike back at you.
And what we're doing in Ohio is we're moving from a basic manufacturing economy to one that's diversified, including energy and health care and agriculture and IT.
The role of money in politics is terrible, particularly when you're running for president. You get a handful of billionaires who can basically buy the White House.
I think we can have some tax reform, but that doesn't mean tax increases. We ought to make the, the rates flatter. We ought to get rid of a bunch of those loopholes.
We still have systems we don't need, we have infrastructure we don't need. Why do you have over 900,000 bureaucrats working in one way or another in all these systems.
People have accused me at times of having too big of a heart.But I have to also to say I must keep the people of my state safe. So we take a pause [in taking refugees].
We've just let too many things happen. And now, try to turn around and fix it. Getting involved in a [Syria] civil war directly was never something I thought made sense.
Let's start off with my father being a mailman. So I understand the concerns of all the folks across this country, some of whom having trouble, you know, making ends meet.
Republicans and Democrats spend so much time fighting and then they're all aghast, you know, and so it's just not the way we ought to be. The coarseness is not acceptable.
In faith, I'm a believer in the do's - you know, love your neighbor, love your enemy. I don't spend a lot of time thinking on the don'ts 'cause I can't get the do's right.
Somebody tells me no, they're not going to keep telling me no, because I'm going to bother them to the point where it's a lot easier for them to say yes than keep saying no.
A great power has to have the discipline not only to go when necessary but to know when not to go. Getting involved in ethnic, religious civil wars is a recipe for disaster.
I just went to a wedding of a friend of mine who happens to be gay. Because somebody doesn't think the way I do, doesn't mean that I can't care about them or can't love them.
You watch people run for president, and a large part of what they say, they don't ever follow through on. But I don't think you can afford to wait on this [trade agreements].
I think that's coming to an end. And, you know, when we ... we can't beg them [russians] to get along with us. And I think there was some of that going on, which has now ended.
I'm not a plotter or a schemer. I'm a guy that looks at problems and tries to solve them, which I have done all of my career, creating jobs in Washington, creating jobs in Ohio.
Nobody wants anybody who's radical, who wants to move in here to be able to gain access. I said we should take a pause on these Syrian migrants. And I believe we should do that.
I think it's too late. I think that there's been too much. This all started with the red line, walking away from it. The inability to arm the legitimate [Bashar] Assad opposition.
And, frankly, what happens out of Washington is, it creates a wind in my face, uncertainty over Obamacare, uncertainty over their tax policy, uncertainty over the regulatory policy.
I was discouraged when I read that [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell said that Trans-Pacific Partnership was dead, but then I was told he turned around and said, "No, it's not."
I don't know the extent to which they do business [ in Wells Fargo]. I just want to see how this thing continues to unfold and if they have a legitimately major change in their culture.
I was the chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the chief architects the last time we balanced a budget, and it was the first time we had done it since man walked on the moon.
There is a difference between Iraq, where you have Sunni, Shia, and Kurds put together after the First World War by the Western powers. It doesn't work. It needs to break up into three parts.
Let's think about how we can bring economic development, let's see if people could learn a little more of the rule of law, rather than the rule of man, which is kind of what you see in China.
Furthermore, when there is cheating, the cheating needs to be called. And I see that the administration has become much more aggressive on that front [of retraining people who get displaced].
We're now going to develop the standards on transparency, data collection for police, but the whole goal is to fully integrate the police into the community because everybody has the same goals.
One of the things that I'm really concerned about is that people who don't have power are not priorities for people in public life. Maybe it's always been that way, but I see it more starkly now.
I was the chairman of the Budget Committee and the lead architect the last time it happened in Washington, and when we did it we had great economic growth, we cut taxes, and we had a big surplus.
Never in my lifetime have I been called boring. But I think I was a boring candidate for president because I tried to be responsible. And one of the greatest problems I had is that I was governor.
A lot of politicians now, here's what they're worried about. If you're a Democrat you're worried about your base on the left, and if you're a Republican you're worried about your base on the right.
So when they don't have certainty, they go the other way. In Ohio, we have given them certainty and things have been improved. But if we can get a Romney presidency, they are going to get much better.
Do you think that I like to have to fight the leaders in my own party over this or that? Of course not. There's no joy in that. But John Kennedy may have said it best - sometimes my party asks too much.
We got to make sure that we have the incentives for people to rise and not put them in a position of where they go to work and they lose more than what they gain and they're like this system is terrible.
I think that they are hung up on, you know, that people cheat and we don't enforce the laws, and I think that's correct. But I don't think people want to just say, "We're not going to trade with anybody."
[President] needs to engage them in a very personal way. And he needs to tell them that this is something that America, the United States of America, needs. Not Republican. It's not Democrat. It's America.
If somebody wants to sit down with me for an hour and interview me and ask me any question about my record, my policies, my foreign policy experience, my domestic policy experience, I'm willing to do that.
First of all, we're not Rust Belt. I mean, that's an old term. We do have manufacturing. We have a half-a-billion-dollar investment from a Chinese individual, which brings a couple thousand jobs in Dayton.
But, frankly, to try to create some sort of a religious standard in terms of who can come to America, we're a melting pot. And as long as people have positive and good intent, they ought to be able to come.
I mean, it would be very easy to make an inflammatory statement on what we ought to do on cyber. I don't think that that's productive. But to allow the Russian activity to go unresponded to is not acceptable.
[Donald] Trump is touching a nerve because people want the wall to be built. They want to see an end to illegal immigration. They want to see it, and we all do. But we all have different ways of getting there.
I'm going to love my daughters; I'm going to love them no matter what they do. Because, you know what, God gives me unconditional love. I'm going to give it to my family and my friends and the people around me.
Business has to have capital.I think Wall Street is a necessary ingredient of the global economy, you've just got to keep people realizing that helping clients is the most important thing, not helping yourself.
The single biggest way to stop the drug crisis is to educate people on the fact that if you do it, it's probably going to kill you or it's going to ruin your life. So why don't we all work together to stop that?
When I left Washington, we actually had a balanced budget and we paid down the most amount of the national debt in modern history and cut taxes and created jobs. And I was the chief architect of that plan in '97.
When I listen to candidates spend all their time attacking Barack Obama, I'm glad they're not driving this bus because they'd be looking through the rear-view mirror. I look through the windshield at the road ahead.
For heaven's sake, this is 2015. I've run the largest technology company in the world. Let me assure you we know how to build an employer verification system that would work. We can solve this. We just need to do it.
It's a very serious matter. And what should we do about it? We should reinforce NATO. We need to be prepared to take solid actions to make it clear that we will not tolerate any intervention, and Russian intervention.
The first thing we better get going is strengthening our economy, because if we don't have a strong economy, we can't pay for all of this. And the world wants us to be able to function from strength, believe it or not.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, Ohio 's coming back because we set a clear path, we cut taxes, we balanced our budget, we got credit upgrades when the whole rest of the world, including America, was being downgraded.