I don't know how we continue to do politics in a democracy if we simply can't listen to one another, if we simply close the door and say you are beyond redemption.

I think it's important for Americans to try to understand each other a little better.

A genuine approach to budget cutting - knowing exactly what you're cutting and why, and with what real-life consequences - is beyond my competence, and probably beyond the competence of any politician in America.

One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.

American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.

You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.