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.

We shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women.

All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.

We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.

We could come together, Democrats and Republicans, to find practical, commonsense solutions to health care, to education, to energy issues, because although I'm a proud Democrat, I'm a prouder American. And I think all of us believe, regardless of our party affiliations, that this is a critical time, where we've got to solve big problems.

History doesn't always move in a straight line. Sometimes it zigs and zags.

I absolutely think that it's possible for us to find common ground.