Nothing can be taken for granted and this great achievement is now under assault by Russia. But what we did in my time is no less honorable. It is for the present generation to defend.

Lincoln is quoted more often than he's understood, and he understood that the founding principle of our nation is, in fact, the Declaration of Independence.

The sense the great democracies of the world - Europe, the United States, Japan, others - are going to set the agenda for the world. [Russians] want to bring that down.

There is nothing wrong when the Trump administration says it wants to find areas of common ground to work with Russia - perfectly reasonable. The question is, are you willing to pay the Russians in advance for the privilege of working with them in areas that are supposed to be of common interest, and that - I don't see the American interest in doing so.

The Civil War was fought, in a sense, over whether that sentence - all men are created equal - is to be taken literally. And the southerners in the 1850s argued that it was not.

The same people the Americans sent over - that we sent over to advise the Russians, we also sent over to advise the Poles about how to build a post-communist economy. Same people, same advice, with radically different results, which leads to suspicion it's not our advice which was the crucial variable. It was the Poles, on one hand, and the Russians on the other. The Poles succeeded; the Russians didn't. Don't blame us.

We have a deep sense of American equality and opportunity, and that informs the way in which we brought our American power to the world, because we thought that other nations were entitled to that same opportunity in a rules-based system.