The question is not whether you would like to be president or not. The question is: Do you think you can win and do you want to run? And none of those are clear to me.

I have fought against excessive spending my entire career. And I got plans to reduce and eliminate unnecessary and wasteful spending and if there's anybody here who thinks there aren't agencies of government where spending can be cut and their budgets slashed they have not spent a lot of time in Washington.

But I'm still a work in progress. My mother calls me quite frequently with various critiques of my performance on TV and other public events. She's usually pretty severe with her comments.

We make the future better than the past. We don't hide from history. We make history.

An act of heroism, of extraordinary courage, the grandeur of it, won't easily inspire us to act in imitation, but it can inspire us to emulate its author. For that, we should learn what we can of the whole experience of the subject, the hero's life, as it was before and after, and believe that trying to emulate the character it reveals is one tried way to prepare for the tests that might await us and gain hope that our courage will not be wanting in the moment.

As part of my misspent youth, I spent too much time in the sun, and every few months, I have to go and have some basal cell removed from my old craggy features.

Our economy, I think, is still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong.