There's a reason why the NRA's not here. They're just down the street. And since this is the main reason they exist, you'd think that they'd be prepared to have a debate with a president.

Many of us were kind of irritated with Obama for larding it with tax cut, which we didn't think was going to be stimulative.

If you like your existing plan you get to keep it

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.

We cannot have a society, in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

If I'm president, some day, young kids will look at the world differently. They will say, I could be president some day. They couldn't have said that before I came along. The world will see the United States in a different context, as a country of true opportunity for all.