A great power has to have the discipline not only to go when necessary but to know when not to go. Getting involved in ethnic, religious civil wars is a recipe for disaster.

Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.

If we intend to provide a better life, and a better world, for future generations, we can't ignore the quality of the environment we leave them.

Every time I go to Washington, I break out in a cold sweat. So I try not to spend too much time there.

I'm a believer in bipartisanship.

Ohio's doing what it can do, but I wish they'd get their act together in Washington.

The reason we have such a reform budget is because we've been thinking about these things for a long time.

We've unveiled the most comprehensive reform budget people have seen in a generation.

You know where entrepreneurship in my opinion has to go? Into the inner city.

And what we're doing in Ohio is we're moving from a basic manufacturing economy to one that's diversified, including energy and health care and agriculture and IT.

And you know what? At the end of the day, it gets down to Obama and Romney. And what it's going to get down to is this. Obama is going to say, 'I inherited a mess and I'm making it better.' And Romney is going to say, 'you haven't made it good enough. And I can do far better than you have done.'

And, frankly, what happens out of Washington is, it creates a wind in my face, uncertainty over Obamacare, uncertainty over their tax policy, uncertainty over the regulatory policy.

But, at the end of the day, we need to represent the taxpayers who have made enormous sacrifices. Many have lost their jobs. Many of them have seen their companies - they don't have a pension - they have seen their companies cut the match for their 401(k). They have seen their health care benefits be shredded.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, Ohio 's coming back because we set a clear path, we cut taxes, we balanced our budget, we got credit upgrades when the whole rest of the world, including America , was being downgraded.

I think he should let me run Ohio. He should let us, the legislature, the members there, we should be running Ohio. The states are the laboratories out here, and I think the president needs to mind to the problems that he has in Washington.

I think we can have some tax reform, but that doesn't mean tax increases. We ought to make the, the rates flatter. We ought to get rid of a bunch of those loopholes.

I want to tell you ladies and gentlemen, the actions that we took were not always easy. The actions that we took were not always popular. But when you get yourself in public office, you must lead, you must do what's necessary.

It's not trickle down economics. The problem that the president has is that he's rudderless on the economy. I mean, he doesn't quite know what to do. It's a wake-up on Monday and try to figure it out. It takes time to turn a supertanker, so you need to know where you need to go.

Mitt Romney has a history of being a great job creator. Secondly, he was a great governor. He went from billions of dollars in the hole when he became governor to billions of dollars in surplus when he left. And he went from the loss of tens of thousands jobs when he became governor to the creation of 40,000 new jobs when he left office.

So when they don't have certainty, they go the other way. In Ohio, we have given them certainty and things have been improved. But if we can get a Romney presidency, they are going to get much better.