Al Qaeda is still a threat. We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK.

There is a little bit of that schoolyard attitude of, it's one thing for a guy your own size to mouth off to you, but if there's a little guy, you should just smack him around. And it's probably bad advice in the schoolyard. It's certainly not a good way to run a foreign policy because even when you are dealing with a non-peer, militarily, war is complicated.

The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another

By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. So we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow and I expect to be around in see it.

You know, it's fashionable right now for people to be cynical. We go in cycles like this and right now a lot of people are saying, 'Oh, America is doing terribly' and 'What are we going to do?'

Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.