When you take on the position of president, you are committing yourself to, first and foremost, protecting the American people. You are accepting an institutional role that requires you to make hard decisions and hard choices, and as a consequence you have to take your moral sense and not put it aside.

Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, of mutual responsibility. The idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity. Americans know this. We know that government can't solve all our problems - and we don't want it to. But we also know that there are some things we can't do on our own. We know that there are some things we do better together.

My administration doesn’t have any secrets, and from now on, neither will you.

America is much less violent than it was 20, 30 years ago, and immigration is much less a problem than it was not just 20, 30 years ago, but when I came in as president.

I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.

I want to control our own energy by developing oil and natural gas but also the energy sources of the future.

I think the American people recognize that the world has shrunk. That it's interconnected. That you're not going to put that genie back in the bottle.