When you're a former president, you have much less power, but you have a lifetime of experience and contacts and if you've got the energy, you can bring influence to bear on a small but still fairly substantial number of things where you can concentrate on it because you don't have to change the subject when you wake up in the morning and there's something else in the newspaper.

We must work tirelessly to make sure that every boy and girl in America who is up for adoption has a family waiting to reach him or her...This is a season of miracles, and perhaps there is no greater miracle than finding a loving home for a child who needs one.

What works in the real world is cooperation.

Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life.

The fights I fought... cost a lot --the fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seats in Congress. The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House.

I tell you, my fellow Americans, that if we learned anything from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the governments in Eastern Europe, even a totally controlled society cannot resist the winds of change that economics and technology and information flow have imposed in this world of ours. That is not an option. Our only realistic option is to embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow.

Just as war is freedom's cost, disagreement is freedom's privilege.