Rand Paul quotes:

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.

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.

As long as I sit at Henry Clay's desk, I will remember his lifelong desire to forge agreement, but I will also keep close to my heart the principled stand of his cousin, Cassius Clay, who refused to forsake the life of any human, simply to find agreement.

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.

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?

The right to life is guaranteed to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence, and ensuring this is upheld is the Constitutional duty of all members of Congress.

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 biggest thing I've learned from my dad is he's had adoring crowds of 8,000 at Berkeley, and 6,000 at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. That's an amazing feat to have people coming out in one of the most liberal universities and one of the most conservative.

The thing is I think vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we have. I'm a big fan and a great fan of the history of the development of the smallpox vaccine, for example.

I believe we should work to end all racism in American society and staunchly defend the inherent rights of every person.

A free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.

I think it's a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant - but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.

The NSA should keep close watch on suspected terrorists to keep our country safe - through programs permitting due process, the naming of a suspect, and oversight by an accountable court.

I don't want my marriage or my guns registered in Washington. And if people have an opinion, it's a religious opinion that is heartly felt, obviously they should be allowed to practice that, and no government should interfere with them.

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

Really, having a gun registry and having to rely on the government to keep it secret, the government isn't so great at keeping confidences.

We live in a democracy, and people are free to sometimes choose the wrong leader.

Most police officers are good cops and good people.

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

The Constitution's pretty clear. The Federalist papers are pretty clear... They very specifically delegated the power to declare war to Congress. They wanted this to be a congressional decision; they did not want war to be engaged in by the executive without approval of Congress.

Because Republicans believe that the federal government is limited in its function-some have concluded that Republicans are somehow inherently insensitive to minority rights. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The government can't even do a good job of something as simple as running the Post Office. How can it be expected to do a good job with something really important, like educating our children?

No American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found guilty of a crime by a court.

For too long, we've attached some mythic notion to government solutions, and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.

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 lovers of liberty rise to the occasion?

To defend our country we need to gather intelligence on the enemy, but when the intelligence lies to Congress, how are we to trust them? The phone records of law abiding citizens are none of their damn business.

Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies - where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.

As a doctor, I will take it and make it my mission to heal the nation, reverse the course of Obamacare, and repeal every last bit of it.

Peace through Strength' only works if you have and show strength.

When you look at statistics for the white community alone, you see that we've become two separate worlds in which the successful are educated and wait to have children until they are married, and those in poverty are primarily those without higher education and with children outside of marriage.

I think public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids and how they are good for public health is a great idea.

The Ukraine has a long history of either being part of the Soviet Union or within that sphere.

Big and oppressive government has long been the enemy of freedom, something black Americans know all too well.

Whether you breach the Fourth Amendment 20 percent of the time or 100 percent of the time, it's still not the point. The point is whether or not you still collect millions of people's information with a single warrant.

I'm not questioning Dick Cheney's motives. There's a chance for a conflict of interest. At one point in time, he was opposed to going into Baghdad. Then he was out of office and involved in the defense industry, and then he became for going into Baghdad.

Opponents of civil liberties contend the NSA data collection has made our country more safe, but even the most vocal defenders of the program have failed to identify a single thwarted plot.

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 what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.

The most important thing you will do is yet to be seen. For me, I found my important thing to do when I learned to do surgery on the eye, when I learned to restore a person's vision.

The sacrifice of our personal liberty for security is and will forever be a false choice.

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 don't associate with those people.

I think young people of all races are interested in justice; maybe not so much taxes and regulations, but they're interested in justice and the right to privacy on the Internet.

I think every day we look at the mess of the chaos of the civil war in Iraq, I think every day people become more and more convinced that the war was a mistake. I think we have to learn from the mistakes of our past.

If you refuse to acknowledge that there is any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative, and you cannot lay claim to balancing the budget.

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 woke up one day, and Pakistan had nuclear weapons.

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 Supreme Court must strike down the government's illegal spying program as a violation of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a gross violation of that nation's sovereignty and an affront to the international community.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

In our state, I'm really proud of the fact that the ones who overturned Jim Crow in Kentucky were Republicans fighting against an entirely unified Democrat Party. So I am proud to be Republican. I can't imagine being anything else.

I support engagement, diplomacy, and trade with Cuba, China, Vietnam, and many countries with less than stellar human rights records, because I believe that once enslaved people taste freedom and see the products of capitalism, they will become hungry for freedom themselves.

Throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, federal mandatory minimum laws were implemented that forced judges to deliver sentences far lengthier than they would have if allowed to use their own discretion. The result has been decades of damage, particularly to young people.

I support the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

I don't think I've ever used the word 'gay rights,' because I don't really believe in rights based on your behavior.

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Smith v. Maryland that a few days' worth of phone records for a single individual were not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The NSA today, though, collects hundreds of millions of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans without an individualized warrant.

I want to collect more records from terrorists, but less records from innocent Americans. The Fourth Amendment was what we fought the Revolution over! John Adams said it was the spark that led to our war for independence, and I'm proud of standing for the Bill of Rights, and I will continue to stand for the Bill of Rights.

The West is in for a long, irregular confrontation - not with terrorism, which is simply a tactic, but with radical Islam.

If U.S. occupation is a primary recruitment tool and what inspires Islamic terrorists, are many of our current efforts overseas actually fighting terrorism and diminishing the threat?

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

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

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

The Palestinian Authority gets money from the American taxpayer.

I don't think it's hypothetical whether or not it's a good idea to topple secular dictators in the Middle East and hope to get a good outcome and hope that stability comes thereafter.

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 believe that in the historic and religious nature, marriage is between a man and a woman.

Stop spending money you don't have.

If you hear me out, I believe you'll discover that what motivates me more than any other issue is the defense of everyone's rights.

The Republican Party's history is rich and chock full of emancipation and black history.

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.

My budget is similar to the Penny Plan, which cuts 1 percent a year for five or six years and balances the budget.

If any Republican nominee wants to run on the idea that borrowing money and printing it up and sending it to foreign countries that often hate us and burn our flag and think it's a good idea, feel free to run on that issue. But it's not really popular with the people.

I would have voted 'no' on the Iraq war and 'yes' to Afghanistan.

To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.

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

The real debate is, when does life begin? When life begins, it deserves protection.

No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual.

I think if you're forthright and answer a lot of questions, sometimes you'll get people who won't let you answer the questions, and that makes for a difficult answer.

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

I think people are hungry for someone who will stand up on principle.

Do you hate poor people or do you just hate poor people with jobs?

Putin must be punished for violating the Budapest Memorandum, and Russia must learn that the U.S. will isolate it if it insists on acting like a rogue nation.

I tell people I won't vote to go to war unless I'm ready to go or send my kids.

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

You don't win as a party unless you become a bigger party.

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

I would argue that you're only going to get the conservatives, particularly a Republican House, to pass immigration reform if we, as conservatives, are reassured that the border is controlled and that we get to vote on whether the border is controlled.

I'm for immigration reform. I think the system's horribly broken, and we need to do something about it.

I think the key to getting rid of illegal immigration, no matter where its coming from, is that you need to have a good legal apparatus for immigration.

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

We as Republicans have taken the easy way out a lot of times.

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.

The world does not have an Islam problem; the world has a dignity problem.

How will we defend ourselves if the Patriot Act expires? Well, perhaps we could just rely on the Constitution and demonstrate exactly how traditional judicial warrants can gather all the info we need - and how bulk collection really hasn't worked.

Income inequality is worse in towns run by Democrat mayors than in towns run by Republican mayors.

I don't think you should have everybody's information from their bank. There should be some process: accusations and proof that you've committed a crime.

I've had an interest in politics since I was a little kid.

Everybody is looking for an election where they can do something and participate.

I ran for office originally as part of this Tea Party Movement because we were upset with Republicans who've doubled the debt. We were upset with Republicans that bailed out the banks.

I give thousands of interviews, and I'm probably about as open as anybody in Washington as far as access goes, so I'll continue to do that.

It is illegal for the CIA to spy on Americans and an affront to our Republic to spy on the Senate.

As president, I would promote a Fair and Flat Tax plan, known as the 'EZ Tax.' My tax plan would be the largest tax cut in American history, reforming individual, business, and worker taxes.

A Tea Party tidal wave is coming.

I've been accused of wanting to allow terrorists to have weapons to attack America.

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.

Individual warrants every day are used to arrest dangerous people.

People say America is exceptional. I agree, but it's not the complexion of our skin or the twists in our DNA that make us unique. America is exceptional because we were founded upon the notion that everyone should be free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

Republicans traditionally say, 'oh, we'll cut domestic spending, but we won't touch the military.' The liberals - the ones who are good - will say, 'oh, we'll cut the military, but we won't cut domestic spending.'

My tax cut would cut hundreds of billions of dollars. So to do it, you have to be willing to cut spending, too. But if you were to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, that money's left in communities.

After all the sacrifice in Afghanistan and Iraq, why do we find ourselves in a more dangerous world?

Laws don't really restrain people. Ninety-eight percent of people follow a virtuous course with or without laws.

I still say exactly what my original opinion is. Do you borrow money from China to send it to anyone? Out of your surplus, you can help your allies, and Israel is a great ally. And this is no particular animus of Israel, but what I will say, and I will say over and over again, we cannot give away money we don't have.

The vast majority of my time is traveling and talking about the issues. It isn't really calling and asking for money.

Still people want to topple [Bashar] Assad. And then there will be chaos, and I think ISIS will then be in charge of Syria.

I think that if you believe in regime change, you're mistaken. In 2013, we put 600 tons of weapons - us, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar - into the war against [Bashar] Assad. By pushing Assad back, we did create a safe space.

I think those who have wanted regime [of Bashar Assad] change have made a mistake.

I think that by arming the allies of ISIS, the Islamic rebels against [Bashar] Assad, that we created a safe space or made that space bigger for ISIS to grow.

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.

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.

Well, I think a handshake is something that honorable men do. Before we had contracts we had handshakes that expressed that we were making an arrangement that was based on our honor. And I don't think I can shake the hand of someone who shows and lacks honor by attacking a man's faith.