My fellow Americans, all of us in this grand hall and everybody watching at home, when we vote in this election, we'll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in. If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we're-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.

Supporters of capital punishment bear a special responsibility to ensure the fairness of this irreversible punishment.

Even if it takes changing the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.

The American people have now spoken, but it's going to take a little while to determine what they've said.

We must continue to deepen our ties to the Americas and the Caribbean, our common work to educate children, fight drugs, strengthen democracy, and increase trade.

Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up.