Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. it's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.

It will be up to each of you to make sure that young people, African Americans, Latinos and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again.

I do think that saving the economy was a pretty big deal. We did a lot of stuff early that ended up having an impact. I believe that the work we've done in moving our energy future in a cleaner direction is going to stick even if some of the individual steps that we took are reversed by future administrations. I think that it's embedded itself in the economy.

We have a stake in one another...what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart.

Your kids grow up. I think they more than anything are making me feel as if, you know, you want to squeeze everything you got every single day out of this thing. Because it passes quick.

The federal government and our democracy is not a speedboat. It's an oceanliner, as I discovered when I came into office. It took a lot of really hard work for us to make significant policy changes, even in our first two years, when we had larger majorities than Mr. Trump will enjoy when he comes into office.

Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, of mutual responsibility. The idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity. Americans know this. We know that government can't solve all our problems - and we don't want it to. But we also know that there are some things we can't do on our own. We know that there are some things we do better together.