Our nation has kept faith with its veterans. Funding for veterans healthcare and benefits is strong, and has increased more than 75 percent in the last decade.

I also believe that Hurricane Katrina did reveal a weakness in our energy supply systems, highlighting the reliance this country has on the gulf coast for our energy resources.

The young patriots now returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other deployments worldwide are joining the ranks of veterans to whom America owes an immense debt of gratitude.

Twenty-five million veterans are living among us today. These men and women selflessly set aside their civilian lives to put on the uniform and serve us.

America's veterans embody the ideals upon which America was founded more than 229 years ago.

Since the Revolution, eight generations of America's veterans have established an unbroken commitment to freedom.

From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country's best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny.

Each family of the United States military now attends to their loved ones funeral with a wrenching worry that it will be met possibly with a protest or a demonstration.

The nation's obligation to her defenders is as old as that defense itself.

In fact, it is often times a detriment for the Government to preemptively legislate on an issue before we can either define it or grasp its impact.

I expect VA's inspector general and the FBI to work closely together so that we can identify and eliminate the flaws that allowed this leak and prosecute any criminal acts.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

It's hard to get a hug wrong.

I strongly support the call to greatly expand our human intelligence capability to penetrate al Qaeda and gather critical intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks on our homeland.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

To make the world a friendly place, one must show it a friendly face.

Here is a thing which the more you fear and avoid it the nearer you approach to it, and this is misery; the more you flee from it the more miserable and restless you will become.

Negativity drove me out of politics in the mid-Nineties.

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

When I take a break for a week, it takes me three weeks to get back to where I was.

The biggest research of all when I do a character is self-examination. You look at yourself and you ask, 'How am I similar to this person and how am I different?'