It has been hard to muster the resources to support fledgling democracies and to intervene on behalf of the most desperate. The AIDS orphans in Uganda, the refugee fleeing Zimbabwe, the young woman who has been trafficked into the sex trade in Southeast Asia. It has been hard, yet this assistance together with the compassionate work of private charities, people of conscience and people of faith, has shown the soul of our country.

We've organized human potential and have been better at using human potential better than any country on the face of the Earth. That's because we've recognized that our national creed, our national identity, is that it doesn't matter where you're from, it matters where you're going. You can come from hard circumstances and do great things. We've got to make that true for a whole variety of people who no longer feel that.

I'm actually genuinely optimistic about the United States and what's possible in the United States. And when you're out here, you see Americans across racial and economic and socioeconomic lines working together. And you maybe get a little bit less cynical than when you sit in the seat of kind of the epicenter of it all.

Everywhere that I go in the world, people desperately look to American leadership in all of their world's most difficult problems. You can look at any region of the world and the United States is still the country to which those regions look for leadership.

This system, built on free markets, free trade and free peoples and American protection, that's what got us from the end of World War II to the extraordinary events of the end of the Cold War and a system that was one of prosperity and peace for a lot of people, including for the United States.

I think there are plenty of men out there who are capable and accomplished in their own realm. You don't have to be in the same field. I've often been asked, "Didn't you want to get married?" And of course I wanted to get married, but you have to fall in love and want to marry a particular person. You don't get married in the abstract. So, although there were people I felt I might have married, it just never happened.

If you're always in the company of people who agree with you, you're going to think of people who don't agree with you as venal or stupid. I constantly tell my students that if they're in the company of people who always say "amen" to what you say, find other company. And that is the source of illiberalism, when you are unable to listen to someone who thinks differently. That's when democracies are in trouble.