Ron Paul

Everyone assumes America must play the leading role in crafting some settlement or compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington explicitly warned against involving ourselves in foreign conflicts.

Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.

Aggression and forced redistribution of wealth has nothing to do with the teachings of the world's great religions.

In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself.

As recent as the year 2000 we won elections by saying we shouldn't be the policemen of the world, and that we should not be nation building. And its time we got those values back into this country.

How did we win the election in the year 2000? We talked about a humble foreign policy: No nation-building; don't police the world. That's conservative, it's Republican, it's pro-American - it follows the founding fathers. And, besides, it follows the Constitution.

We have a government that purposely counterfeits and debases the currencies, and I believe that the alternative would be a competition. That means that anything that wants to substitute for the American dollar should be permitted.

Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don't do to other nations what we don't want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?

All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.

The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.

Back a hundred years ago, especially around Woodrow Wilson, what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.

When the dollar is in trouble, that will be one of the alternatives, and the more Bitcoins are used, the worse it will be for the dollar.