Richard Burr Quotes

As we walk our individual life journeys, we pick up resentments and hurts, which attach themselves to our souls like burrs clinging to a hiker's socks. These stowaways may seem insignificant at first, but, over time, if we do not occasionally stop and shake them free, the accumulation becomes a burden to our souls.

One’s spiritual life will never rise above the practice of one’s private prayer life.

The Word and prayer are inseparable. When one engages in prayer without the Word, it can lead to mysticism; when the Word is used without prayer, it can lead to legalism, intellectualism and coldness of heart.

corporate revival always begins with personal revival—specifically, the revival of one’s heart in the secret closet of prayer.

To help members of Congress and their staffs understand the nature of the risk, I invited a computer science and engineering professor from the University of Michigan to visit the Capitol and demonstrate the ease with which a hacker could change an election’s outcome. We gathered in a room in the Capitol Visitor Center, where the professor had set up a paperless voting machine used in numerous states, including swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Four senators participated—Senators Lankford, Richard Burr, Claire McCaskill, and me—and the room was filled with staffers who had come to better understand the process. The professor simulated a vote for president, where we were given a choice between George Washington and the infamous Revolutionary War traitor Benedict Arnold. As you might imagine, all four of us voted for George Washington. But when the result came back, Benedict Arnold had prevailed. The professor had used malicious code to hack the software of the voting machine in a way that assured Arnold’s victory, no matter how the four of us had voted. He told us that the machine was very easily hacked, enough so that, in a demonstration elsewhere, he turned one into a video game console and played Pac-Man on it. Can you imagine?

Another important precedent was set when Burr boldly subpoenaed Jefferson himself. Jefferson’s papers held nothing to exonerate Burr, but Burr apparently hoped to discover damaging or embarrassing information that would help him in the court of public opinion. Jefferson compromised by allowing court officials to see relevant documents, but cited “executive privilege” to prevent their public release. This sensible doctrine held that presidents could not fulfill their duties, particularly diplomacy, without a modicum of secrecy; it would be both used and abused by many future presidents, most notably in Richard Nixon’s final attempt to prevent release of his Oval Office recordings.