Happiness, for me, is a function of the number of people I love, and I think joy and happiness is directly related to how many people are in our lives and how deeply we are bonded with those people. And so I'm happy if I'm with Ann; I'm happier if I'm also with my family and my grandchildren.

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.

Like me, the great majority of Americans wish both to preserve the traditional definition of marriage and to oppose bias and intolerance directed towards gays and lesbians.

As we watch the world today, sometimes it seems that we`re at the mercy of events instead of shaping events. And a strong America`s essential to shape events, and a strong America, by the way, depends on a strong military.

Barack Obama has done something I find very hard to understand. Ever since FDR, we`ve had the capacity to be engaged in two conflicts at once, and he`s saying, No, we`re going to cut that back to only one conflict.

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.

The soles of Neil Armstrong's boots on the moon made permanent impressions on our souls and in our national psyche. Ann and I watched those steps together on her parent's sofa. Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world. God bless Neil Armstrong.