One cannot understate the importance of eliminating Bin Laden. He was a symbolic head of the organisation and, as we now know, an operational head of the organisation.

Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not in some ways differ significantly from the country that existed almost 50 years ago. This is truly sad.

I'm a 21st century guy, secure in who I am.

We need election systems that are free from fraud, discrimination, and partisan influence and that are more, not less, accessible to the citizens of this country.

I think that what I'm doing is right. And election-year politics, which intensifies everything, is not going to drive me off that course.

When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.

There are a whole variety of reasons I want to be attorney general, a whole variety of things that I do as attorney general that go beyond national security.