The idea of America endures. Our destiny remains our choice. And tonight, more than two centuries later, it is because of our people that our future is hopeful, our journey goes forward, and the state of our union is strong.

If you look at Libya, I was deeply concerned about what would happen after Qaddafi was gone.

This week I've travelled more than 15,000 miles from America to China to Burma to Australia. I have no idea what time it is right now.

If we’re going to have arguments, let’s have arguments — but let’s make them debates worthy of this body and worthy of this country.

You know, there are certain things that make for good sound bites but don't always translate into good policy.

It's my job as President and Congress’s job to maker sure that there’s some rules of the road that people are going to abide by and that we’ve got transparency and accountability that this stuff is being posted and one of the things that we are going to do is put together an independent board on the recovery package…

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.