A few years ago, (Barack Obama) would have been getting us coffee.

We've had periods of meanness in American politics. Actually, the dawn of partisan division in America was basically in George Washington's second term, when it was obvious that he would be the first and only consensus president.

There's this whole problem of trafficking, which has gotten worse in the economic downturn, which disproportionately affects young women, but also affects some young men who are sold into bondage, into basically servitude for indebted work that they can often never escape from.

You should strive to find happiness every day and not believe that it comes at the end of the journey.

When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.

A preemptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future. And because... I've done this. I've ordered these kinds of actions - I don't care how precise your bombs and your weapons are, when you set them off, innocent people will die.

The United States is too big and we are too involved with too many people for any president to be able to take actions that will be universally agreed to all day, every day and everywhere in the world.