I'd read 'Paradise Lost' as an undergrad at university but remembered little about it. No, not true: I remembered few details, but carried with me with the persuasive arguments and pitiable dilemma of its arguable protagonist, Satan.
During the campaign for re-election, Barack Obama at least made vague references to a willingness to accept $3 trillion of reduced spending in exchange for a $1 trillion dollar tax increase.
Protecting all this land, working with the President to establish all these monuments, to, you know... I think the President has a land protection record that's second to no one in this century, maybe Teddy Roosevelt.
There's a basic kind of tension here. It's between those who say, I'd like to clear cut this forest and reduce it to saw timber because that's an economically productive thing for me to do.
Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress.
There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals.
Once you start saying, 'Let's talk political, my own politics, my own aspirations,' it can become not just distracting in that it takes time, but it can become confusing and frustrating, and is this now a political agenda or a governmental agenda.
The enemy is not just terrorism. It is the threat posed specifically by Islamist terrorism, by Bin Ladin and others who draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within a minority strain of Islam that does not distinguish politics from religion...
Let's put aside the politics and trust the people. Let's embrace the unique opportunity we all have; take the heat and make the hard and difficult decisions, knowing that we're doing it to make things better for the people of Illinois.
Getting elected Governor of New Mexico, I really did enjoy that job. I thought I made a really big difference, and I think the same running for president of the United States - that I could make a really big, positive difference.
In the case of Iraq, notwithstanding the violence there at the moment, the very fact that a hideous regime - responsible for genocide, for the use of chemical and biological weapons, aggression against two neighbors - has been removed in itself is a ...
I have long been a supporter of the Head Start program because each and every year I witness the dramatic positive impact that early intervention services have on children's lives in my congressional district.
Canada and the United States are also working at the World Trade Organization and in our own hemisphere with negotiations for a Trade Area of the Americas to try to help countries create a positive climate for investment and trade.
Ninety percent of all people under 30 are in developing countries, and that means that this new access to tech, which is such a positive thing... is also a ticking time bomb of frustration... You get this clear mismatch of opportunity and expectation...
We must not fail to recognise that television can be a hugely positive influence in children's lives, one of the greatest educators in contemporary society and an increasing influence on all the children followed in 'Child of Our Time.'
I can't tell you how important it is for people on the public stage to utilize that stage in a constructive, positive way. When you're in the public eye, you have a decision to make - whether you are going to be an influence or not.
It just happened that the course of the campaign went negative we actually went positive for a little over a week and you do the tracking of poll numbers and it hurt us. So the public responded to those type of ads.
I would say in just about every investigation we have, there will be differences of opinion, where you have partial facts, as to what those facts mean.
Secondly, not only have we put additional agents on counterterrorism, but we've also built up our analytical structure so that we're better positioned to analyze the information we have.
And at that point, I think we all realized it was something tremendously tragic, probably a terrorist attack, and the next step was to go down to our command center and get things going.
But we had - I think if you look at law enforcement 10 years ago, if you look at the challenges, the FBI was focused excessively on what was happening in the United States.
