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.

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

I'm happy and content in my life, and I chalk that up to wonderful parents and a wonderful God.

I certainly have no regrets about overthrowing Saddam Hussein. I'd do it again. And, yes, there are a lot of things that I think we'd all do differently. Maybe we made some erroneous assumptions about the fabric of the society in Iraq and about the solidity of some of the institutions. And yes, there are a lot of things I would do differently. I'd probably work to rebuild Iraq from the outside in, rather than concentrating so much on Baghdad, for instance.

Democratic openings that come about in that way - the overthrow of a totalitarian government by external powers - it makes it really hard to make those first steps toward democracy.

We [USA] need to deal with our problems here at home if we're going to be strong enough to lead abroad.

I don't think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.