Sure, losing an election hurts, but I've experienced worse. And at an age when every day is precious, brooding over what might have been is self-defeating. In conceding the 1996 election, I remarked that "tomorrow will be the first time in my life I don't have anything to do." I was wrong. Seventy-two hours after conceding the election, I was swapping wisecracks with David Letterman on his late-night show.

The horizon is out there somewhere and you keep chasing it, looking for it and working for it.

Yet when the blood of the sons of immigrants and the grandsons of slaves fell on foreign fields, it was American blood. In it you could not read the ethnic particulars of the soldier who died next to you. He was an American. And when I think of how we learned this lesson, I wonder how we could have unlearned it.

Stop telling the truth about my record!

I have been uplifted by the extraordinary power of the American heart - by those armies of compassion, who are willing to cross town or cross the globe to minister to those they've never met and will never see again.

You know, a better man for a better America. That's sort of our slogan.

When it's all over, it's not who you were ... it's whether you made a difference.