Dr. Ben Carson, a possible Republican presidential contender, addressed plagiarism in his 2012 book America the Beautiful for the first time publicly on Thursday.
"Plagiarism, there were some mistakes made there. It was a historical book. It had a lot of quotations and citations. We happened to miss a couple.I take full responsibility for that," said Carson, speaking at the Republican National Committee's winter meeting in California.
"When I make a mistake, I'm willing to fess up to it. I have learned from that, be extraordinarily careful. Going back and looking at every other book that I've ever written, so far it looks pretty good. But you must always take responsibility if you do something and it's not perfect and you must learn from that whenever it happens. And that's how you make progress, you'll never make progress by trying to act like you're perfect because none of us are."
BuzzFeed News discovered earlier in January that there were several instances of plagiarism in Carson's book. The plagiarism included a website from 2001, SocialismSucks.Net, a book by conservative historian W. Cleon Skousen, a Liberty Institute press release, several blog articles, and a CBS News article.
Zondervan, the HarperCollins imprint which published the book, said it would update future printings and Carson apologized in a statement to BuzzFeed News at the time.