There is no doubt that America remains the premier political, economic, military power in the world, and I both expect and count on it remaining so, because I think that's certainly in our best interest but also the best interests of the world.

Sometimes there's not a direct transfer of skills from business to government, but sometimes what happened in business would be really bad for government.

Today, you've got hedge fund billionaires aligned with Karl Rove, running ads against me to try to get Democrats to vote for you [Bernie Sanders]. I know this game. I'm going to stop this game.

I am delighted to be here in these new [Council on Foreign Relations] headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it's good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won't have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.

I think again we're way out of balance. We've got to rein in what has become almost an article of faith that almost anybody can have a gun anywhere at any time. And I don't believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people.

I disagreed with the way the court applied the Second Amendment in Heller's case, because what the District of Columbia was trying to do was to protect toddlers from guns and so they wanted people with guns to safely store them. And the court didn't accept that reasonable regulation, but they've accepted many others. So I see no conflict between saving people's lives and defending the Second Amendment.

How do we prevent attacks? How do we protect our people?I think we've got to have an intelligence surge, where we are looking for every scrap of information.