Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility.

[Illegal immigration] costs the taxpayers of the United States a lot of money. And it's unfair to Americans who are working every day to pay their own bills. It's also unfair to a lot of people who have waited in line for years and years in other countries to be legal immigrants.

The simple fact is that we must not-and we will not-surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice.

Today, many companies are reporting that their number one constraint on growth is the inability to hire workers with the necessary skills.

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.

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.

From New Hampshire forward, for reasons that absolutely mystified me, the press thought the most important issue in the race was the middle class tax cut. I never did meet any voter who thought that.