"I’d rather be the president. Let him be the vice president."

On Rick Santorum criticizing him and suggesting he would be his vice president in the same week:

“Well, you know, you’re on all the time when you’re running for office,” Romney said. “Everything you say is being followed by, you know, a small camera of some kind that someone has. You don’t always get every word just right. And so you have to give people a little bit of slack I think. In this case Rick Santorum is a good guy, he’s running a good campaign. We have some differences in background and differences on some issues, but basically a good guy and, you know, I’m happy with him saying he’d like to be part of an administration with me, nothing wrong with that, if he’s the VP that’s better. I’d rather be the president let him be the vice president.”…

On Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggesting that Romney’s remarks that Russia is the United States’ No. 1 geopolitical foe is a statement stuck in the 1970s, and whether Russians are more like us than our other enemies:

“I don’t want to call the Russians our — someone like us exactly,” Romney said. “The Russian people, certainly, are people like us, but you have Vladamir Putin and Mr. Medvedev, and they’re continuing to support Iran and to keep us from putting in place crippling sanctions against Iran as it pursues its nuclear weaponry. They continue to support Assad, Bashir Assad in Syria. They continue to support people like Chavez and Castro. They basically stand up for the world’s worst actors, and when America tries to put pressure on those actors with sanctions or other UN actions, Russia always stands up for what I would consider to be the world’s worst leaders. So if they were like us they would say you know what, get rid of Assad. They’d say — Iran, you may not have a nuclear weapons, that is unacceptable, we’re going to put in place crippling sanctions against you. Kim Jong Il, open up your nation and let people have freedom. If they were like us, they’d be speaking in favor of freedom as opposed to opposing it.”