Winston Churchill used to say that we, Americans, try every other option before we finally do the right thing. After everything else is exhausted we eventually do the right thing and I think that's true for Congress as well. And it's important for Americans to remember that politics has always been messy.

We are unique among advanced countries that we don't have universal health care. My hope was that I was able to get a hundred percent of people health care while I was president. We didn't quite achieve that, but we were able to get 20 million people health care who didn't have it before. And obviously some of the progress we made is now imperiled because there's still a significant debate taking place in the United States. For those 20 million people, their lives have been better.

I don't want ever to be a president who is comfortable and at ease with killing people.

Those of us in positions of responsibility, we'll need to be less concerned with the judgment of special interests and well-connected donors, and more concerned with the judgment of posterity.

Michelle [Obama] never fully took to the scrutiny. I mean, she's thrived as a first lady, but it's not her preference.

My hope would be that, as we're moving through the world right now, we're able to get that psychological or emotional peace by seeing very concretely our kids doing better and being more hopeful and having greater opportunities.

I have no interest in increasing the size of government. I just want to make sure we have got a smart government that is regulating, for example, the financial institutions smartly, so I don't have to engage in any kind of bank bailouts.