The thing that has disturbed me most about the Russian hacking episode is - and the thing that surprised me most has not been the fact of Russian hacking. The cyber world is full of information gathering, you know, propaganda, et cetera. I have been concerned about the degree to which, in some circles, you've seen people suggest that Vladimir Putin has more credibility than the U.S. government. I think that's something new.

Each side has legitimate aspirations - and that's part of what makes peace so hard. And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in the other's shoes; each side can see the world through the other's eyes. That's what we should be encouraging. That's what we should be promoting.

If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

A relentless focus on the outward markers of success can lead to complacency. It can make you lazy.

In many ways [those middle-aged black ladies] my touchstone, because they are what I meant when I talked about the audacity of hope.

We have to find ways in which, collectively, we agree there's some things that government needs to do to help protect us, that in this age of non-state actors who can amass great power, I want my government - and I think the German people should want their government - to be able to find out if a terrorist organization has access to a weapon of mass destruction that might go off in the middle of Berlin.

The Internet and Twitter and all these things are very powerful, but it also means sometimes that instead of having a dialogue we just start calling folks - calling each other names. And that's true on the left or the right.