Mail enables businesses to deliver vital services and products, including medication, and allows these same businesses to receive payments in a timely way.

Mail in our country serves as an economic engine.

Illinois is becoming more diverse, more tolerant, and even more green.

Illinois is large, but we do not always receive our fair share of federal resources because our leadership is often divided. When we all row together, good things happen.

In my experience, union leaders are respected by their members.

As a small-business man myself, I believe strongly that improving the health of small businesses is the key to improving the economy, growing the middle class, and creating innovative products and services.

Before I was elected to Congress, I helped to create the public corruption unit in the office of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. Unfortunately, business was good. Among the usual suspects were government contracts steered to insiders - leaving Illinois taxpayers holding the bag.

Following well-established national security screening procedures and accurately informing Congress about them is not a joke or a political game. It is essential to guaranteeing that our national secrets are protected and to preventing possible blackmailing of key administration officials.

One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.

Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done.

Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'

People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.

There's absolutely no bubble in technology.

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.

I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system.

How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.

I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

I suspect Obama did not know he was recording Angela Merkel's cell phones.

I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.

I did not want to write just another business book.

When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon - and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today, our government is broken.