I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago 's South Side.

I will never turn Medicare into a voucher. No American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies. They should retire with the care and dignity they have earned.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

[People] are looking for some means of control and what that means is is that the politics in all of our countries is gonna require us to manage technology and global integration and all these demographic shifts in a way that makes people feel more control, that gives them more confidence in their future.

Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office.

I think [ chief organizer of the Democratic Party ] it's something that I have an interest in.

This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.