The White House has a choice: They can change course, or they can double down on a vision of government that the American people have roundly rejected.

Everybody has barriers to overcome, some more than others. I don't want to act like I'm all that unique. America's full of stories like mine. This is a special country with enormous opportunity for those who don't quit.

I hope in the end that people will remember what Reagan said: that if he could get 80 percent of what he wanted, you call it a win and move on.

It is a president's constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate's constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent.

Today, Democrats not only have the White House; they have the Senate too. So we have to be realistic about what we can and cannot achieve, while at the same recognizing that realism should never be confused with capitulation.

The bill that job creators and out-of-work Americans need us to pass is the one that ensures taxes won't go up - one that says Americans and small-business owners won't get hit with more bad news at the end of the year.

Let me speak for myself: The Russians are not our friends.

In the last 100 years, three presidents suffered big defeats in Congress in their first term and then won reelection: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the most recent example, Bill Clinton.

To call this a recovery is an insult to recoveries.

Things happen in American politics in the political center. If the President will meet us in the center, there are things we can accomplish.

A reporter asked recently, 'What keeps you up at night?' I replied that I generally sleep well, but if I ever do have trouble, I don't have to count sheep. I count all the states I'm glad I'm not the governor of.

So in the House and Senate, we own the budget. So what does that mean? That means that we can pass the spending bill.

It is time for a leader who will lead.

I think we need to respect the wishes of voters. They have been busily at work making these decisions in primary after primary after primary.

Bills should go through committee.

President Obama had two Supreme Court nominees in his first term. There was no filibuster against them.

I don't want to sound like a whiner here, but if you get beat up all the time, it affects you.

You know, 'Professor Obama' has been a label applied to him by Republicans and Democrats alike. He's a very smart guy. But I think he'd be, you know, better served not to spend so much time trying to impress us with his particular position on an issue and understand that there are things upon which we simply have a disagreement.

Americans are too speedy.

I think it's a time to be sad about what's been done to the United States Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the world.

We need to be honest with the public.

I'm not going to critique every utterance of the president.

Our nation has a regrettable history of drawing down our forces and readiness after each conflict, only to find ourselve ill-prepared for the next great struggle.

The country doesn't need saving.

I thought the Pence selection ought to reassure the right-of-center voters that a Trump administration would be a right-of-center administration.

No matter what a candidate for president may say during the campaign, once someone is sworn in, they are constrained by the Constitution - about what the Constitution allows and doesn't allow, what the law allows and doesn't allow.

I don't in any way think the American people rejected the Republican Party, or we'd be in a lot worse shape than we are.

It's time Congress got its priorities straight.

It took us in this country 11 years to get from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution.

Some contend that, by fulfilling our promise to the American people, we're somehow trying to go back to the way things were before ObamaCare - which we all know is untrue.

After 1994, the public had the impression we Republicans overpromised and underdelivered.

Don't fall in love with the map. The map doesn't win elections.

You can give to Americans for Prosperity or something else - a variety of different ways to push back against the party of government.

We need to strengthen and save Social Security for today's workers. If we don't act now, this system, born out of the New Deal, will become a bad deal.

What I have said is, when the American people elect divided government, what are they saying? I think they're saying we know you have differences of opinion on big things.

It is time to move away from advise and obstruct and get back to advise and consent.

If the administration wants cooperation, it will have to begin to move in our direction.

The administration still wants to govern from the far-left and that's going to produce kind a partisan result here in the Congress.

I don't think it's all that unusual for a new president to want to get along with the Russians. I remember George W. Bush having the same hope.

I only talk to the press if it's to my advantage.

There is a lot of room for improvement in Social Security. We owe our children the most financially sound system possible. They will have paid into it their entire working lives. They deserve to be protected by it. for our children and grandchildren.

Syria and Iran have always had a pretty tight relationship, and it looks to me like they just cooked up a press release to put out to sort of restate the obvious. They're both problem countries; we know that. And this doesn't change anything.

The new troops in Iraq need to be Iraqi troops.

The president feels not only do we need to change these rogue regimes, but even our friendly allies, who really basically have, sort of, benign dictatorships, need to get with the program if they want to have long-term security and prosperity from terrorism.

Bolton's exactly what the U.N. needs at this point. The president's right on the mark in picking him.

I think the important thing to remember here is that we haven't been attacked again at home since September of 2001.

The debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.

We're not gonna misread our mandate.

By their own admission, leaders of the Republican Revolution of 1994 think their greatest mistake was overlooking the power of the veto. They gave the impression they were somehow in charge when they weren't.

We're living under the Obama economy. Any CEO in America with a record like this after three years on the job would be graciously shown the door. This president blames the managers instead. He blames the folks on the shop floor. He blames the weather.