Everybody potentially can make the claim that we should all be treated fairly.
We are very grateful for the vital contributions Germany has made to this fight, training local forces in Iraq, sharing intelligence providing reconnaissance aircraft including the recent deployment of additional NATO AWACS.
In America, one of our challenges, historically, is that we have very low voting rates, even during presidential elections.
When I turn over the keys to the president-elect, America will be much stronger than it was when I came into office.
I was elected because I believed in what we call "grassroots politics," politics from the bottom up, not the top down.
Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin.
There's a little perspiration involved in bringing about change too.
Before I even came into office, I said that preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon was a priority.
There are always going to be some complications.
If you look at Libya, I was deeply concerned about what would happen after Qaddafi was gone.
For Democrats who are feeling completely discouraged, I've been trying to remind them, everybody remembers my Boston speech in 2004. They may not remember me showing up here in 2005 when John Kerry had lost a close election, Tom Daschle, the leader of the Senate, had been beaten in an upset. Ken Salazar and I were the only two Democrats that won nationally. Republicans controlled the Senate and the House, and two years later, Democrats were winning back Congress, and four years later I was President of the United States.
It requires enormous energy for us to cut the African American uninsured rate by a third. A lot of scars.
The problem was, and we saw some of this in the immigration-reform issues as well, was they hadn't done sufficient homework to know that I didn't have all the capacity they thought I did in order to just execute this through the stroke of a pen.
Those are the ladies sitting in church. And in the same way that they might feel a joy and release on Sunday, they are still going to work on Monday. And that's who I was listening to during this process. And if at the end of my presidency they feel like I did a pretty good job, then I'll feel pretty good.
I've consistently said, we need to support charter schools. I think it is important to experiment, by looking at how we can reward excellence in the classroom.
In America, we want a peaceful planet. We want people to be able to enjoy their lives and know they're going to have a bright and prosperous future, not be at war. That's our purpose.
I want to control our own energy by developing oil and natural gas but also the energy sources of the future.
I just want to say that the only thing less popular than putting money into banks is putting money into the auto industry.
The framers, in their wisdom, designed the [political] system so that power's pretty disbursed.
[Michelle Obama] was the hardest sell. And she never fully embraced being in the public spotlight, which is ironic, given how good she is.
I am looking forward to getting out of the bubble. I am glad that I'm leaving this place at a relatively young age, at 55. So I have the opportunity for a second maybe even a third act in a way that I think would be tougher if I were, you know, the age of some presidents when they left.
One thing I think we have to do is to make sure that the undocumented workers who are living in America today, that they have to take responsibility. They've got to register, pay a fine, pay their back taxes, learn English and then get on a pathway in which they could have the prospect of being here legally.
The more we are using clean energy, renewable energy sources, the less environmentally problematic facilities end up being a problem for everybody, but particularly for folks who have to suffer the consequences of some of these facilities.
You have to have a strong team around you [being a president].
I'm skeptical that [the Republicans] can do [something better with healthcare] mainly because for seven years now, including when we first tried to pass health care, I said to 'em, "Okay, if [Obamacare] doesn't work tell me what does."
