“People want to psychoanalyze me, but the fact is, I’m not that complicated. I’m pretty straightforward. And I’m not all that self-reflective, because I tend to be a doer.”

History’s long arc is different than the today’s headlines.

In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you came from; it matters only where you are going.

The quicker we get about the business of reducing our reliance on oil the better.

Every life is capable of greatness.

The best armor against everything around you is to be well educated, to work hard, to be twice as good as if you had to be, to do languages and culture better.

You can never ask others to do something you would not do. That is integrity.

Leading in a complex world means recognizing the simple things you can do to make things better.

We’re not going to negotiate about the terms of terrorism. You don’t negotiate about terrorism. It’s is wrong to engage in terrorism, and there isn’t anything to negotiate.

You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable.

If you cannot allow people to do their jobs, nobody with substance and creativity will work for you.

What you know today can affect what you do tomorrow, but not what you did yesterday.

The people of the Middle East share the desire for freedom. We have an opportunity – and an obligation – to help them turn this desire into reality.

We can’t rely – or no country can rely on just a single personality to carry it forward. And so what the American founding fathers understood was that institutions were built for human imperfection not human perfection.

When somebody underestimated me, it made me want to prove them wrong.

People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.

The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Saddam can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.