I believe we [americans] are strongest as a nation, when the president and Congress work together.

And, as a consequence of the pressure that we've applied over the last couple of weeks, we have Syria -- for the first time -- acknowledging that it has chemical weapons, agreeing to join the convention that prohibits the use of chemical weapons, and the Russians -- their primary sponsors -- saying that they will push Syria to get all of their chemical weapons out. The distance that we've traveled over these couple of weeks is remarkable.

In November [2016], Americans are gonna have to make a decision about what we care about and who we are. We get these spasms of politics around immigration and fearmongering and then our traditions and our history and our better impulses kick in. That's how we all ended up here. 'Cause I guarantee you at some point every one of us has somebody in our background who people didn't want coming here. And yet here we are.

All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.

I've been called worse on the basketball court.

He [Barack Obama] might have a pen, and he might have a phone, but what he does not have is the constitutional power to run this country like a dictator.

True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home. The people of the world want change. They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history.