There have been times where, let's say on LGBT issues, when we were trying to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I got the Pentagon and Bob Gates, a Republican holdover from the [George W.] Bush administration, to authorize a study of how you might end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, headed up by Jeh Johnson, who at that time was a council to the Justice Department. And it was going to take a year to conduct that study, issue a report, and figure out how it might be implemented, what effect it would have on unit cohesion and military effectiveness.

But I'm here to say that when we do speak out, we're going to do so because the United States of America does believe, and will always stand for, a certain set of universal values.

I think that we've had an economy that's been out of balance for too long. So the general principle of raising taxes on higher income Americans, like myself, and providing relief to those who haven't benefited as much from this new global economy, I think is a sound one.

Iran . . . has failed to take the opportunity to demonstrate that its nuclear program is peaceful . . . time is not unlimited.

We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal ... that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

The United States has to go through structural reforms in terms of improving our education system or revamping our infrastructure or, you know, looking at some regulations that weren't properly controlling excesses on Wall Street.

That's when America soars, when we look out for one another and we take care of each other, when we root for one another's success, when we strive to do better and to be better than the generation that came before us and try to build something better for generations to come, that's why we do what we do. That's the whole point of public service.