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.

Most days are not overwhelmingly successful in your life. And what really marks whether you're going to be successful is how well you deal with the bad days, not how well you deal with the good ones.

Well, I didn't feel that I could do justice to this story of my parents and their generation, and all that they did to make it possible for me to be who I am, if I sort of just put it at the beginning of a book about my last eight years in foreign policy.

I really do fervently believe that every child deserves to have the kind of access to educational opportunities, broadly defined, including music and sports, that I enjoyed. So, I'm trying to do my part, and I believe that all of us with a privileged background who are fortunate enough to have had that kind of access have a responsibility to try to pass it on.

There's no greater challenge and there is no greater honor than to be in public service.

I've been an athlete all my life. I was a competitive figure skater, and then when I realized skating was not an adult sport I took up tennis and played that quite seriously from the time I was about 18.

For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.