The Supreme Court nominations [example]. I mean, the fact that Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans, was able to just stop a nomination almost a year before the next election and really not pay a political price for it, that's a sign that the incentives for politicians in this town to be so sharply partisan have gotten so outta hand that we're weakening ourselves.

So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are.

That's the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we've already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

What I want to try to do is unify the two wings of the Democratic Party. What's considered the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party - the more centrist wing of the party. I think we can craft an approach that is more American, pro-worker, pro-business, pro-growth.

No development strategy can be based only upon what comes out of the ground, nor can it be sustained while young people are out of work.

I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.

We're not going to baby sit a civil war.