If you don't have good people, and you don't have a good process and you don't have, at some level, the basic reverence for [presidential] office, and an understanding of the incredible responsibilities and obligations, then, I think you can get into trouble.

One of the great things about our democracy is it expresses itself in all sorts of ways. And that includes people protesting. I've been the subject of protests during the course of my eight years and I suspect that there's not a president in our history that at some point hasn't been subject to these protests.

My liberty depends on you being free, too.

To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is under suspicion, everybody is corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are full of malevolent actors - if that's the storyline that's being put out there by whatever party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument with facts that are made up, voters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they're going to believe it.

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.

I think I was able to talk to people about values in ways that people - in ways that resonated with folks.

If we got there and we looked up and we said, "You know what? Black folks are still doing a little bit worse off than whites, but it's not like it was 20 years ago," then we can have a discussion about how do we get that last little bit. But that's a high-class problem to have.