I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters – and the church does not speak for me.

Do I think faith will be an important part of being a good president? Yes, I do.

As president, you can get all kinds of advice from all kinds of people. But at the end of the day, when it comes time to make that decision, as president, all you have to guide you are your values and your vision and the life experiences that make you who you are.

I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn’t think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him.

If I were to make public these tapes, containing blunt and candid remarks on many different subjects, the confidentiality of the office of the president would always be suspect.

Each faithful young woman in the Church proclaims that individual worth is one of her most cherished values.

My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home – I think in those days we called them arguments – about who was right and who was wrong.

A President cannot always be popular.

When I was elected President nobody asked me to negotiate between Israel and Egypt. It was not even a question raised in my campaign. But I felt that one of the reasons that I was elected President was to try to bring peace to the Holy Land.

I think I’d be a better president because I was in combat.

I think it is important for Europe to understand that even though I am president and George Bush is not president, Al Qaeda is still a threat.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

As president, I’m committed to making Washington work better and rebuilding the trust of the people who sent us here.

My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ‚We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.‘ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

All leaders in the Lord’s Church are called by proper authority. No prophet or any other leader in this Church, for that matter, has ever called himself or herself. No prophet has ever been elected.

We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of women within the church. The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

How does a nice Catholic girl end up going to prison for a year? It’s crazy. I’ve made mistakes. I have to pay for those mistakes.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Of course we all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic Party. Kind of a grin with a body behind it.

I believe that the primary role of the government is to protect people and not run their lives. You used to be able to believe that in the Democratic Party.

That’s the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want.

Despite the slowness, the infidelity, the errors and sins it committed and might still commit against its members, the Church, trust me, has no other meaning and goal but to live and witness Jesus.

A church without women would be like the apostolic college without Mary. The Madonna is more important than the apostles, and the church herself is feminine, the spouse of Christ and a mother.

I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs.

I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief.

About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing.

I want a president with a record of public service: someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase form and fortune for ourselves; we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive.

Spiritual worldliness kills! It kills the soul! It kills the Church!

I can die a happy man never having been president of the United States of America. But it doesn’t mean I won’t run.

There is a danger that threatens everyone in the church, all of us. The danger of worldliness. It leads us to vanity, arrogance and pride.

I don’t think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.

I’ve seen how the issues that come across a president’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer.

The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, ‚How is the president?‘

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

If we had more hell in the pulpit, we would have less hell in the pew.

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour.

Presumptuous for me to say, but at least – at a minimum – I’ve been able to influence the direction of the Democratic Party on foreign policy. And I’ve been relatively – presumptuous to say – relatively successful legislatively in the Senate, being able to win a lot of Republican friends, and being able to cross the aisle.

Under the doctrine of separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.

Obama did organize a great large number of people and many enthusiastic people, what’s called in the press ‚Obama’s Army.‘ But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, to introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That’s critical.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

If I hadn’t been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house.

Anyone who is to find Christ must first find the church. How could anyone know where Christ is and what faith is in him unless he knew where his believers are?

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I’m from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

How can a president not be an actor?

I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I’m telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy!

I think when the president of the United States calls for military action, he should do it for a united people, especially when the methods have been so cruel, so explicitly directed at Americans.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year.

The President is not only the leader of a party, he is the President of the whole people. He must interpret the conscience of America. He must guide his conduct by the idealism of our people.

I’m the only president you’ve got.

I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln – just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.

I don’t want to just preach to the church. I feel like I have a broader message.

We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: when a church becomes like this, it grows sick.

A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader.

You’re president, if you conclude my judgment is not the right judgment, I abide by that, but I want an opportunity to have an input.