What drags down our entire economy is when there's an ever-widening chasm between the ultra-rich and everybody else.

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.

To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is under suspicion, everybody is corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are full of malevolent actors - if that's the storyline that's being put out there by whatever party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument with facts that are made up, voters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they're going to believe it.

We are willing to uphold principles that have resulted in unprecedented prosperity and security throughout Europe and around the world. With the threat of climate change only becoming more urgent, Angela [Merkel] and I focused on the need for American and E.U. leadership to advance global cooperation.

E.U. need to be nurtured and cultivated and protected and fought for because the achievements that we've seen on this continent, in contrast to a divided Europe of the previous century, are ones that remind us of how important it is that we work together.

When our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act.

I've got certain responsibilities that I have to carry out in a very specific institution and in a specific moment in time.