I have never once regretted missing a business opportunity so that I could be with my children and grandchildren.

I'm not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there, if we need to repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who are struggling, and I'll continue to take that message across the country.

What we have, what we wish we had - ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed, investments won, investments lost, elections won, elections lost - these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us.

Iraq is fragile and may fall back into a devastating setting. We're not making the kind of progress in Afghanistan that had been promised. And our esteem around the world has fallen. I can't think of a major country. It's hard to think of a single country that has greater respect and admiration for America today than it did five years ago when Barack Obama became President. And that's a very sad, unfortunate state of affairs.

I would say that foreign policy is a place where intelligence, resolve, clarity, and confidence in cause, is of extraordinary importance.

I'm a big believer in getting money from where the money is, and the money is in Washington. I learned from running the Olympics that you can get money there to help build economic opportunities. We actually got over $410 million from the federal government; that is a huge increase over anything ever done before. We did that by going after every agency of government. That kind of creativity I want to bring to everything we do (in Massachusetts).

I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts Barack Obama has, as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making our future less certain and less secure.