You didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try. We tell people - we tell our kids - that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do. That’s why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.

It could be another election where the alignments between Republicans and Democrats are different than they were this time and who a foreign country prefers.

I think that people are concerned about the breakdown of the family but they also don't want to see discrimination against gays and lesbians who they work with and they want to be able to make sure that gays can visit each other in hospitals and be able to inherit property.

If you listen to the rhetoric, it is so over-the-top and so overheated, and most importantly, is not acknowledging the fact that there's nothing else [like guns] in our lives that we purchase where we don't try to make it a little safer if we can.

Every president who has tried to bring about big changes I think elicits the most passionate responses.