Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.

I think that's become passe but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family - a statement - and you can afford it then that's a noble project.

You go to a restaurant in the States and kids have these game boards at the table. You don't see that in Italy or Spain. It's not because they can't afford to buy them it's because that's not what eating together as a family is about.

The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

It is time to return to core values time to get back to basics to self-discipline and respect for the law to consideration for the others to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family - and not shuffling it off on other people and the state.

My parents were French and Irish and our family even has Spanish blood-and I do so love the United States and consider myself part American.

In the past 40 years the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar the church and the private school supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest craziest most dysfunctional family in the world all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair you'll be going 'you know we're alright. We are dang near royalty.'

There are many countries where you can only believe more or you can believe less. But in the United States we have this incredible smorgasbord and it really interests me why people are drawn to one faith rather than another especially to a system of belief that to an outsider seems absurd or dangerous.

It's really important to say this. Often the faith schools were founded before the state provided education. I want good education in this country so I'm not going to slag off faith schools. I think that it's important that people of different backgrounds and different faiths go to school together and many faith schools do that.

I think church and state should remain entirely separate at all costs and that the decision of religious marriage should be of each faith to debate and decide free of political influence.

I have deep respect for people's individual faith but when faith gets connected to the machinery of state or the machinery of hate I find it very confronting.

We have the incredible privilege of serving in the highest offices in the state. We must prove ourselves worthy of our fellow citizens' faith. We must be trusted to always place the public's good above our own and to always choose fairness over favoritism.

What the F.D.I.C. does is to put the full faith and credit of the United States government behind every savings account in the nation up to a limit that has changed over the years and stands now at $100 000.

To imply that religious believers have no right to engage moral questions in the public square or at the ballot is simply to establish a Reichian secularism as our state faith.

And so today if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens.

The United States have fulfilled in good faith all their treaty stipulations with the Indian tribes and have in every other instance insisted upon a like performance of their obligations.

I have faith in the United States and our ability to make good decisions based on the facts.

From those to whom much is given much is expected. I have been given much - the love of my family the faith and trust of the people of New York and the chance to lead this state. I am deeply sorry that I did not live up to what was expected of me.

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

That someone like Obama could be elected president of the United States - with its unrivaled power and prestige - has begun to restore the country's and the world's faith in America as the land of opportunity.