I would not have imagined being asked to be Secretary of State, it was a great honor to serve with President Obama in his cabinet.

After 9/11, I went to work with Republican mayor, governor and president to rebuild New York and to get health care for our first responders who were suffering because they had run toward danger and gotten sickened by it. Hundreds of thousands of National Guard and Reserve members have health care because of work that I did, and children have safer medicines because I was able to pass a law that required the dosing to be more carefully done.

I have a lot of experience dealing with classified material, starting when I was on the Senate Armed Services Committee going into the four years as secretary of state.

I believe in community policing. And, in fact, violent crime is one-half of what it was in 1991.

We must realize that our destiny is strongly linked to the destiny of the poorest on this planet.

I don't want [to work] people who agree with me. I want honest, spirited, hard-working, patriotic people who want to be part of a team, the American team.

We have places in America that really have been just forgotten.