When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.

If America is at war, I won't speak a word without measuring how it'll sound to the guys doing the fighting when they're listening to their radios in the desert.

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.

We can't change minds without knowing what's in them.

I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an Atheist. We have separation of church and state in the United States of America.

I get always a little uptight when I hear politicians say how exceptional America is.

As a public person, I've always tried to reflect what is embodied in our defining ideals as a nation about equality and fairness and justice and so forth.