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I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.

The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.

When I was younger, I was drawn to Ayn Rand books and other works of fiction celebrating individualism.

My fear is that people associate Rand Paul's social conservatism with libertarianism, when it's not.

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.

I know it is very hard to rise above the influences of party prejudice. Often, it almost drowns the sentiment of patriotism. Party rancor and party hatred are the last serpents which the genius of patriotism can crush.

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

There's a trend toward anti-heroes now, and I think it goes back to guys like Bogart and Cagney. They seemed to have no compassion, and they were always alone.