... the country deserves us to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good.

When it comes to crime, the violent crime rate in America has been lowered during my presidency and any time in the last three, four decades.

The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won't sign a deal unless the nature of the Iranian regime completely transforms. And that is, I think, a fundamental misjudgment.

There's a whole generation coming up behind us that was engaged, inspired, worked for change during the course of my presidency, saw what was possible.

You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

Someday, our children, and our children’s children, will look at us in the eye and they'll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world?

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they're not discriminated on the job.