“Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.”

“The right to be irresponsible and stupid is something I hold very dear. And luckily it is something I do well.”

“You forgot the ‘my precious,’” Anna said dryly. “If you want to act like a freaking nutcase, you have to do it right.”

“All politicians are humble, and seldom let you forget it. They go around the country boasting about their humility. They are proud of their humility. Many are downright arrogant about their humility and insist that it qualifies them to be President.”

“We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction”

“Experience tells us that sometimes, when minorities insist on their rights, they ultimately prevail.”

“I do not insist that I am right: I merely think so.”

“Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more — and that's the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there's something irreducible that we all share.”

“Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn't interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don't have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it's very different from other rights.”

“Right now, America looks like a fatheaded, shortsighted, gas-guzzling arrogant blowhard to the rest of the world.”