Life is grim, and we don't have to be grim all the time.

It's important that we invest in America - literally. The terrorists wanted to destroy our economy, and we can't let our system fall apart. We also have to invest in one another.

Our life comes in segments, and we have to understand that we can have it all if we're not trying to do it all at once.

For me, being raised in a free America made all the difference.

So there really was a whole series of things that took the women of my generation a little bit of time to push forward.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what's evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We're less sure about what is good. There's sort of good, good enough, could be better - but absolute good is a little harder to define.

I had more problems with the men in our own government, and not because they were male chauvinistic pigs but because they had known me for so long. I might have been a carpool mother and a friend of their wife, and so they'd been to my house for dinner and things like and they thought 'how did she get to be secretary of state when I should be secretary of state?' So that was more of a problem.