"I thought I was going to be killed. The casualties were so heavy, it was just a given. I learned to take each day, each mission, as it came. That's an attitude I've carried into my professional life. I take each case, each job, as it comes."

"Though every legal task demands this skill, it is especially important in the effort to frame public policy in a way that is properly responsive to human needs and predicaments. The question is always: How will the general rule work in practice?"

"There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible."

"This anniversary serves to help remind the American people that, in the wake of one of the greatest political scandals and misuse of power in our history as a nation, scandal produced important reforms that served this nation well for two decades."

"Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own."

"There's something brave and touching about game girls of all ages keeping themselves smart in hard times - one thinks of those wonderful women during World War II drawing stocking seams in eyebrow pencil up the back of legs stained with gravy browning because nylons were so hard to get hold of."

"Americans are rightly concerned about the security and the integrity of the nation's borders because the system is broken. Some are concerned about the possibility of terrorists crossing our borders and coming into our cities."

"Mitt - what I speak to Mitt Romney about is jobs. What I speak to Mitt Romney about is China, because he's got a great view on China and how they're trying to destroy our country by taking our jobs and making our product and manipulating their currency, so that it makes it almost impossible for our companies to compete."