Economy's got to get moving, we've got to get the unemployment rate down. That may be the defining issue of the campaign.

America has a terrible educational problem in the sense that we have too many youngsters not finishing school. A third of our kids don't finish high school, 50 percent of minorities don't finish high school.

Service-learning is a particularly fertile way of involving young people in community service, because it ties helping others to what they are learning in the classroom. It enables them to apply academic disciplines to practical, everyday problems. In the process, it provides a compelling answer to the adolescent's perennial question, 'Why do I need to learn this stuff?

Being in charge sometimes means making people mad. Some days you have to overrule even the best advice, because you think it is not right.

I would caution my Republican friends that [Obama has] three years to go, and in that three years the American people are going to want to see some progress and not just claims that this guy is out of office and we're going to do everything to destroy him or that somehow he is a 'socialist' taking over the country. Have we so lost our faith in this country that we think one person, one man can be can suddenly change our entire system? That's kind of absurd.

One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.

I worked with the Nato Military Committee. The Head of the Luxembourg Armed Forces had equal standing with me, and I had to respect that. He was the leader of the armed forces of a sovereign country. I had to make sure he never thought that I was looking down on them, merely because they had less power than we did. With that kind of approach you can develop bonds of trust. I tried to do the same thing with my colleagues when I was Secretary of State.