Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22-out-of-30 top al-Qaida leaders who've been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.

Battling terrorism must go beyond belligerence vs. isolation.

I know CNN has taken some knocks lately but the fact is, I admire their commitment to covering all sides of the story, just in case one of them happens to be accurate.

I promised to bring change to Washington. The underlying reason for the economic mess we're in has been building for years. It's a fundamental imbalance in which the top 1 percent now gets almost a quarter of all national income. We haven't seen income and wealth this concentrated since the late nineteen twenties, and we all know what happened then - the Great Depression. We'll never really get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession until we fix this basic problem.

I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

We can't in any way criticize or at least indict or impeach administration [of Democratic presidents] for doing what they did.

For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.