There are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

Congress should fund research on the effects that violent video games have on young minds... We don't benefit from ignorance. We don't benefit from not knowing the science.

I don't want to make promises, not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out.

I don't think that there's a hard-and-fast deadline. . . .What we have said all along is that this is not an open-ended process, we are not in this just to talk for talk's sake. . . . We expect prompt, concrete steps to be taken over the next couple of weeks.

If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

It betrays a poverty of ambition if all you think about is what goods you can buy instead of what good you can do.

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.