“I am my happiest self when generations in my family are getting together and I'm cooking.”

“The truth is that the vast majority of Americans are good, fair, and just, and they want their country to reflect those ideals.”

“I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles and the analysis about where there is the intersection, right?”

“Part of my focus on what we need to do around smart gun safety laws is recognize we have to have more enforcement around gun dealers.”

“Mitt Romney subscribes to the cynical logic that says the American dream belongs to some of us but not all of us.”

“I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, "Are you victimizable?”

“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”

“Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.”