Music, to me, was - is - representative of everything I like most in life. It's beautiful and fun, but very rigorous. If you wanted to be good you had to work like crazy. It was a real relationship between effort and reward. My musical life experiences were just as important to me, in terms of forming my development, as my political experiences or my academic life.

America can no longer afford to get the Nobel Prizes while our competitors get the profits.

She got to go to heaven four days early.

I've been talking about income inequality in America for twenty years, and when I was president, people didn't pay much attention to it, probably because wages were going up. But I don't think I've given a single solitary speech since I left office that I hadn't talked about it. It's a problem around the world and within the United States. So these people have put that on the agenda.

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.

Elvis Presley was the first and the best. He is my favorite of all time.

...More important than the deficit, more important then healthcare-more important than anything-we have got to do something about our energy strategy. Because if we permit the climate to continue to warm at an unsustainable rate, and if we keep on doing what we're doing until we're out of oil and we haven't made the transition, then it's inconceivable to me that our children and grandchildren will be able to maintain the American way of life and that the world won't be much fuller of resource-based wars of all kinds.