Nobody gets to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States just to extract political concessions.

My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. But if you look at the track record America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.

As president, I'm committed to making Washington work better and rebuilding the trust of the people who sent us here.

If you're willing to put in the work, the idea is that you should be able to raise a family and own a home, not go bankrupt because you got sick, 'cause you've got some health insurance that helps you deal with those difficult times; that you can send your kids to college; that you can put some money away for retirement. That's all most people want. Folks don't have unrealistic ambitions. They do believe that if they work hard, they should be able to achieve that small measure of an American dream.

I think it's important to realize that I was actually black before the election.

We're all in this together. That's how we campaigned, and that's who we are. This happened because of you. Thank you.

Many of us were kind of irritated with Obama for larding it with tax cut, which we didn't think was going to be stimulative.