Jay Nixon quotes:

For over 25 years, Lacy Clay has been a powerful voice for working families and a tireless advocate for the people of St. Louis. And throughout his long career in public service, I've considered Lacy a close personal friend.

While we all respect the solemn responsibility of our law enforcement officers to protect the public, we must also safeguard the rights of Missourians to peaceably assemble and the rights of the press to report on matters of public concern.

I can't say enough about the tremendous work the Missouri National Guard has done as part of our military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.

The people of Missouri said they expect their elected leaders to support public schools because they know that education is the best economic development tool there is.

We all know there are problems with Obamacare, and Washington's implementation of it has been abysmal. But rejecting Medicaid won't fix any of those things.

I am deeply saddened for the people of Ferguson who woke up to see parts of their community in ruins. No one should have to live like this; no one deserves this. We must do better, and we will.

I haven't met one parent or one teacher in Missouri who thinks we should balance the budget by taking money from kids' classrooms.

Clearly we're in historic times here. We have - one of the tributaries of the Mississippi River is a river called the Merrimack. And the crest areas there - they're going to be a number of feet, 2, 3, 4, over what they were in '93 or '82. And on the Mississippi River itself, down below St. Louis, we're still projecting a couple of feet over that historic number. So the bottom line is there's a significant amount of water that's causing evacuations and challenges throughout that whole area.

It's totally outrageous, ... for someone to take these domain names and then solicit funds, run them through what looks like a legitimate charity using pictures and other hurricane victims, when in reality that money was running to his hate sites.

There is a well-established process by which a prosecutor can recuse themselves from a pending investigation and a special prosecutor be appointed.

I think, at times of stress, you have to trust the pillars of democracy.

So we have a tremendous amount of water where the two greatest rivers in North America meet. And then all of the tributaries from the various areas come in there also. It's also highly populated. So we're working a number of water rescues. We're working extremely hard to keep people safe and make sure that we're keeping the rule of law and keep people warm. It's been pretty cold.

I mean, the power of water to lift cars is amazing. A creek backed up near a railroad track. And an entire train was lifted off of the railroad track and dumped over. People just need to make sure they do not drive into water. It floats the cars, and then we have deaths because of it.

What we have is a great number of people working extremely hard to make sure that death number stays where it is and the people that have to go to shelters are taken care of tonight and for as many days as it takes and that we support our first responders that are out there keeping security.