I have a good eye for talent, and my talent performs the best.

If you've got a big star like O'Reilly, it does overshadow what the hard-news guys do during the day. That's the nature of television.

I want to prove that a fat guy can get to 100 still working.

I love pressure situations. I won't run for cover, and I'll try to take as much of the heat as possible. Because I feel I can stand it better than most people.

I don't want my son to have to collect a bunch of 'New York Times' articles to see what I was like.

It was the summer of 1968 or so, and Dad and my little brother were out camping. While up in the mountains, my brother was bitten by a rattlesnake. As they raced back to the base, my dad sucked out the venom and used his hands as a tourniquet and probably save his life, for it was a serious bite, and he was just a little kid.

After he retired, Dad worked at my uncle's boat company, a camp for kids, and eventually became County Commissioner for a term. He is known around town, works at the Food Pantry my mother helped start, and is a very serious member of Kiwanis.

Vets are different than other people. Frontline or support, they carry themselves differently than the rest of us. It is as if they entered the service as one person and came out another, and that is the person who they are the rest of their lives.

This is what the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) represents. Experimental, explorational science. Learning about Mars as a new world. Discovering new things that will tell us about the history of our solar system, help reveal the secrets of life, and continue blazing the trail that may someday be traveled by the rest of us.

By opening space, for the first time in our history, rather than inexorably extracting the blood of life from this oh-so-precious sphere in our quest for wealth, we will turn outwards and upwards, creating new wealth from places already dead, advancing into places where there is no life, and bringing its seeds with us.

Space is a canvas, as large and blank as any ever created, for it is indeed creation itself, and it calls to us to paint upon it with our own dreams and imaginations anything we wish, anything we want, and anything we can imagine.

Our society's youth will grow up knowing that tomorrow can be better, that there are alternatives for the future, that there are living, breathing humans of all colors and creeds out there in the sky building new worlds.

As we have seen in our own history, the injection of new ideas from other worlds transformed life for all, and with the establishment of new frontier communities far from the reach of the old world, new social systems also formed, more in tune with the fact that it was the individual who had to make the decisions and do the work of pioneering.

Crazy may not be the one who says the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth is round, and someday people might fly. It may be those who laugh at such words whose minds are lost.

I would just ask you for one moment to imagine what today would be like if we had built on that landing by creating a permanent and growing community there and moved on to Mars.

We need Big Ideas, as we are in a time of small people, and as Kennedy showed with Apollo, doing something grand in space is the biggest. At a time of huge national doubt and fear of losing our leadership as a nation to others, it focused us, gave us something positive and inspired a generation.

We have an industrial base - one that, if made to take orders rather than being allowed in the vacuum of leadership to create them, if enabled by the elimination of cost-plus contracting to produce and achieve rather than waste and receive, could make something worth the cost rather than making work that costs us our dreams.

We have a space agency desperately in need of purpose, whose employees and capabilities have been wasted for decades on make-work projects and dead-end PowerPoint pioneering placebos designed to do nothing more than keep the billing high.

The Apollo generation wasn't a historical fluke. It was the predictable result of what happens when a free nation actually decides on something and goes for it. We can do it again, do it better, and do it for keeps this time. But we must decide: Will America, as a nation, support the settlement of space?

There is in us a spark of something good, something right and beautiful.

It is in the failures of our striving that we find ourselves, and it is then, in the rising above them and trying again, that we carry ourselves to the next level. If the runner stumbles, they get up and run again.

Like most Americans, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I am pro-future, pro-hope, and pro-abundance. I am pro-frontier and will talk to and work with anyone else who shares my belief that it is our goal and destiny to expand life and civilization into space.

I want to capture and express that passion I see in life all around me to go wild, to push into anywhere we can, and make of those places new domains for life.

Life comes forth for no other reason than to be and make more life. It will fight and crawl and do anything in its power to live, and once alive, it will stand against all to remain alive. Its existence is its own argument.