John Quotes

How do you prevent people from doing inappropriate things? We can write laws. But at the end of the day, I actually wonder what the board was doing.

Leadership is more important than people's political career at times.

To allow the Russian activity to go unresponded to is not acceptable.

I remember when the Egyptian ambassador to the United States stood in the Rose Garden and pledged Arab commitment to removing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

Everybody who was involved in that culture [Wells Fargo] should be held accountable.

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.

We all have to be, as consumers of information and news, we have to be a little more circumspect. And let's not take everything in that gets fed to us.

I'm an old-fashioned person and I happen to believe in traditional marriage.

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.

I'm a change agent. And what we're beginning to see is a lot of the establish people, one more time, trying to stop me.

I try to keep what I say. And I - I'm not deviated from this position at all.

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.

Any politician who is not a unifier is not somebody that I want to be for.

People are beginning to understand my vision and my message because finally people are beginning to allow me to be heard.

The stuff that I propose are things that I'm ready to govern with. They're not tools to get elected. They are programs and plans to do when you get elected.

I served on the Armed Services Committee for 18 years and we must lead, or the job won't get done, unfortunately, for our country.

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.

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.

There are moderates in Syria who we should be supporting.

Politics doesn't have to be a drag. It can be positive, and it can be fun, and it can be inspiring.

At the end, the Saudis have agreed to put together a coalition inside of Syria to stabilize that country.

I opposed the U.S. involvement in Lebanon. We ended up having to withdraw our marines after our barracks were blown up.

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.

I believe we can solve anything. I believe people working together can lift everybody.

I see Hillary [Clinton] as a calculating politician without any vision. It depends what the next thing is that they calculate she needs to say.

I said that we needed to have people on the ground, troops on the ground in a coalition similar to what we had in the first Gulf War.

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.

First and foremost, we need to go and destroy ISIS. And we need to do this with our Arab friends and our friends in Europe.

Im a believer in bipartisanship.

Say, oh well, the Republicans don't like this therefor I shouldn't do it. What kind of a government would that be. We're not a parliamentary system.

That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.

You want your children to be safe. You want your families to be safe. We know 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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't want to comment on media outlets, but I will tell you that if the Republican Party does not evolve, the Republican Party is going to die.

[Barack Obama] needs to really engage both Republicans and Democrats.

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].

If the [Republican] party wants to have an ideological debate, it's never going to win anything in a major way.

I do believe that the party needs to evolve, or I won't be a part of it.

The administration [of Barack Obama] is going to have to figure out, you know, a tough response on the basis of this [Russian] hacking.

To put all of your eggs in one basket is silly. We did that for a long time and I don't think it's very smart.

When it comes to the cyberwarfare piece, we're going to have to deal with it.

These are serious matters, and we can never let up on these sanctions [against Russia].

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 think to a degree this happens when they [russians] spot a softness in us, which I think for a while they did.

I don't want to get into an argument with somebody about how they ought to vote.

I just don't see anybody that's particularly interested in fixing that.

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.