A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

We remember the surge and we remember the Awakening -- when the abyss of chaos turned toward the promise of reconciliation. By battling and building block by block in Baghdad, by bringing tribes into the fold and partnering with the Iraqi army and police, you helped turn the tide toward peace.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

The Russians don't make determinations about what our defense posture is.

We consume about 25 percent of the world's oil. We only have 2 percent of the reserves.

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.