ANGUS KING

My desire is to be as independent as I can be, as long as I can be, subject to being effective.

One of my life principles is that if something isn't working, doing something harder isn't necessarily going to produce the same result.

How can you work with someone if you went into their state to campaign against them?

If it's necessary to join a caucus and get a committee assignment, I'll do it.

I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon. They called it the imperial presidency when he was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated.

I think that people have to reward those individuals who are prepared to work across the political aisle. I don't see any other way; if you don't talk to people with whom you disagree, you're never going to solve problems.

I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.

I've come to realize that an unencumbered U.S. senator is a profound threat to the whole system. It's somebody that they can't put in a box and say, 'Oh, well, we know how this guy is going to vote.'

I had no intention of getting back into politics. I was teaching at Bowdoin and happily retired from politics.

Somebody said, 'You may be a committee chair.' I don't think so. I don't think anybody would want me that much.

My view of the filibuster is either you've got to lower vote edge or make people really filibuster if they feel that seriously about a piece of legislation.

I have a Twitter account; I have a fantastic Facebook page.

It's hard running as an independent. I wouldn't have won the Senate election if I hadn't been governor. I had credibility. The hard part is getting voters to the point where they think it's thinkable and not a waste of time.

Maine is competing with the rest of the country for jobs and for economic development and we're going to be on the front edge of that competition. And technology is one of the ways to do it.

I communicate with my commissioners quite often. Rather than call them and not know if they are going to be there at that time, I can just sit down and bang out a couple of sentences, send it off, and I'll have the answer within a matter of minutes if they are around, or in hours if they are not.

Health is the single most difficult public policy that a Governor has to deal with.

Seventy percent of our people of Maine touch a computer at least once a day in their jobs.

We could have prevented the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon if we had 20,000 troops shoulder to shoulder.

We’re pretty good in Washington at Monday morning quarterbacking.

If you like the system as it is, I’m not your guy… If you want a shot at changing it, join me.

We proved that with civility, common sense, building bridges, working with coalitions and working with people one at a time, we could do something. … I can speak for the middle. … The real issue is the system itself.

I haven't seen - I haven't heard the arguments that would make that case. And I haven't seen a proposal yet that satisfies the objections. The problem is, you create a key like this, and it can't - it's hard to say that it's going to be hidden. And then it becomes used both by our government in multiple cases, but also it could get out as far as hackers are concerned or other countries.

I think it's important to also realize that this isn't a case of Apple being asked to simply flip a switch or, you know, plug in a wire from one place to another. They're being asked to write new software that doesn't exist. They purposefully did not create this kind of backdoor.

Every day in America, about 25,000 people buy a quarter-inch drill. But nobody in America wants a quarter-inch drill. What they want are holes.

I'm too fiscally conservative for the Democrats and too socially liberal for the Republicans, like 75% of the American people.