In government you carry each hope; each disillusion. And in politics it's always about the next challenge.

Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing.

Well, we definitely need a strong and clear and assertive America. That's for sure. But you've always got to build alliances. And so it's very important that we are able to build those alliances. And where we don't do what in a way to extremists want us to do, which is to make this into a battle between the West and Islam - it's not. This isn't a clash between civilizations. It's about whether the values of tolerance and respect for difference prevail.

Can we be sure that terrorism and WMD will join together? If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. But if our critics are wrong and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in face of this menace, when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive.

The purpose of terrorism lies not just in the violent act itself. It is in producing terror. It sets out to inflame, to divide, to produce consequences which they then use to justify further terror.

Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile. This is a party of government, and I will lead it as a party of government.

You've got problems in Central Asia. And you've got problems within our own communities back home. So if we end up saying, look, this has nothing to do with Islam or it's got no connection with that broader question, then we look, frankly, as if we're in denial about the problem. And the interesting thing in the Middle East is that they have absolutely no problem there in identifying that as Islamist extremism and calling it that.