You know for many elected officials they all started in the same place. You know marriage is between a man and a woman, but they understand that they are moving inevitably, catching up to the American public.

While there continues to be differences, the important point is that all citizens and elected officials use democratic and legal avenues for solving those differences.

The Chinese public is deeply nationalist, which matters to China's unelected political leadership as much as U.S. nationalism does to American politicians. As China becomes the world's largest economy, there is meaningful public pressure for its power status to advance in parallel. Any alternative would be humiliating.

In the past, the U.S. has shown its capacity to reinvent its gifts for leadership. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Nixon abdication and the Ford and Carter presidencies, the whole nation peered into the abyss, was horrified by what it saw and elected Ronald Reagan as president, which began a national resurgence.

To be elected president, you have to do more than tear down your opponents. You have to give the American people a reason to vote for you - a reason to hope - a reason to believe that under your leadership, America will be better.

If Ralph Nader runs, President Bush is going to be re-elected, and if Ralph Nader doesn't run, President Bush is going to be re-elected. We're going to run on the president's strong and principled leadership and his positive agenda for a second term.

Rotary provides training at all levels so that those who have been selected for leadership positions have the opportunity to learn and apply leadership principles to their jobs.

Despite the belief of many career bureaucrats that elected political leadership works for them, our system is built on the idea that the permanent bureaucracy, such as it exists, works for the elected leadership, which in turn works for and represents the American public.

The art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating. It's all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure.

I would say that one of the things that encouraged me so much when I became elected to the leadership was the letters I received from fathers of daughters, saying that, 'My daughter can now do many more things because of what you did.'

Unsurprisingly, the poll-takers don't talk a lot in public about the ignorance of the electorate on political and public policy matters. And the politicians are not going to disclose the, let's say, limited body of knowledge in their constituencies. You don't get elected calling your voters airheads.

My life will not be defined by a single political campaign. Those will come and go. But what has driven me to run for elected office in the past still drives me today: the knowledge that heroes do walk among us with tremendous strength and power.

While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people.

It took 16 years after our independence for the opposition to win even one elected seat. And 23 years after 1988, when the GRC system was introduced, for the opposition to win one GRC.

For the record, I believe elected officials should talk about faith. Our founders believed the moral principles of faith were indispensable to our nation's survival. The Declaration of Independence mentions God four times.

It is true that power corrupts. The hope at the polling stations and the actions of the elected representatives, unfortunately, often turn to be opposite. The power of ballot turns into the power of wallet. Some law-makers become law-breakers.

Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

If our nation is to rebuild opportunity for future generations, it will require our elected leaders to realize that their responsibility lies not with their political party, but rather with the American people that they have been chosen to represent.

I was accepted into Cornell in 1979 and went there to follow a finance and business path. I ended up pursuing marketing and sales because I was selected by Procter & Gamble as an undergraduate candidate to go into its brand management program, which is typically available only to M.B.A. candidates.

My real adversary has no name, no face, no party. It will never be elected, yet it governs - the adversary is the world of finance.

The reason that minorities and women don't have a better shot at getting elected to the Senate or to statewide office is because the campaign finance rules are so skewed as to make it very difficult for non-traditional candidates to raise the money necessary to get elected.

When political leaders fail to denounce anti-Semitic violence and slurs, the void is not only demoralizing to the victims, but silence actually enables the wrongdoing. Silence by elected officials in particular conveys approval - or at least acquiescence - and can contribute to a climate of fear and a sense of vulnerability.

Who elected Larry King America's grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.