I met with many of - a number of [Syrian] refugees in Berlin the other day, and I was struck by how educated, intelligent, and patriotic they are. They want to go back. They love their country. And there are so many of them still in Jordan and in refugee camps in Lebanon and in Turkey, that if you could create the climate within which they could begin to come back, I believe there is such a history of secularism within Syria, even tolerance within Syria, that if we can deal with ISIL, yes. That's the key. And with ISIL there, not a chance.

It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.

I think that our own crisis of democracy is in its own way affecting our ability to leverage in the same way that we used to in the world.

Politics has always been the art of the possible. Today it's too often the art of the probable - tinkering around the edges without any greater vision, without a sense of optimism and imagination.

I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.

We are not interested in a proxy war. Our objective is to change Russia's behavior.

There is a much cheaper way, less complicated way to bring Iraq and Saddam Hussein to its knees: it is simply to send the Bush economic team over there and let them run the country.