Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.

I did not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be the victim of his own foolish sentimentality.

In my father's case, tragically, he was not of use.

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to").

[M]y dad couldn't change who he was, so he was... dismantled over time.

I knew it. I knew this would happen to me... They were never going to let me be president.

My father was a South Carolina nullifier, governor of the state at the time of the nullification row, and then U.S. senator. So I was of necessity a rebel born.

My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room…You always knew they were coming: he was never violent, but short-tempered. It wasn't a violent house, but a violent reservation.

“If I got assassinated now,” he shrugged helplessly, “my father would kill me.”

[My father] was a life-long Republican [...] My father used to always say Democrats want to give you something for nothing. And when you're trying to get something for nothing you almost always end up getting nothing for something.

Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney? The fact is, you ran in '94 and lost. That's why you weren't serving in the Senate with Rick Santorum. The fact is, you had a very bad re-election rating, you dropped out of office, you had been out of state for something like 200 days preparing to run for president. You didn't have this interlude of citizenship while you thought about what you do. You were running for president while you were governor.

[Mim to Nelson] "Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid."

No man is fit to be a Senator... unless he is willing to surrender his political life for great principle.

My father regarded nationalism, including Zionism, as an evil and although he never attempted to convince me of his views, his logic, here, was inescapable.