I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me.

I think actually that the speech work I do is fine. It's important, because I try to help people think about what's going on and organize their lives accordingly.

What really happened in Vietnam was- all these things are away games for the American military. We're not on our home turf, which means to succeed there has to be a partner. And the definition of partnership is someone willing to risk their lives in their home area to prevail because they think it's necessary to build a decent life and a better life for their people.

Nothing we do in this great capital can change the fact that factories or information can flash across the world, that people can move money around in the blink of an eye... Nothing can change the fact that technology can be adopted, once created, by people all across the world and then rapidly adapted in new and different ways by people who have a little different take on the way that technology works.

Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is entirely too secular. The fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have freedom from religion

We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

Torture must only be hypothetical exception, not US policy.