Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity, until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.

We should foster a culture in which people's private religious beliefs, including atheists and agnostics, are respected. And that's the kind of culture that I think allows all of us, then, to believe what we want. That's freedom of conscience. That's what our Constitution guarantees.

The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.

But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.

As long as countries like China keep going all in on clean energy, so must we.

Keeping the people's government open is not a concession to me. Keeping vital service running and hundreds of thousands of Americans on the job is not something you 'give' to the other side.

It's not enough to celebrate the ideals that we're built on, liberty and justice and equality for all. Those just can't be words on paper, the work of every generation is to make those words mean something, concrete in the lives of our children. And we won't get there as long as kids in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York or Appalachia or the Mississippi delta or the Pine Ridge reservation believe that their lives are somehow worthless.