Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.

Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.

The values, the programs, the formula, the determination, and the patriotism responsible for America's past success are still here to be tapped.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

The government can give citizens opportunity and it's their responsibility to take advantage of it.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

The United States doesn't do what it does in the world for altruistic reasons. Nobody set out to be the world's government.