I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.

I think that in politics, when people want to discredit a particular position, they say, "Oh, they are liberals," or "They are conservatives; we are centrists." Everybody wants to be a centrist.

There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.

The presidency is probably the loneliest office in America. Regardless of your friends, regardless of how good your marriage is, regardless of anything, you are alone there at the top.

We can't have extraordinary dynamism, innovation, and change in the economy and expect to have predictability and stability in our personal lives. It's not as if there are these big, giant institutions existing between us and the economy. In fact, these institutions have become tissue-thin. There is no mediation anymore. We are the economy; the economy is us.

Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together.

Our moral authority is as important, if not more important, than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority, not only in the Arab world but all over the world.