Arafat was a barrier to peace.

But I don't think the Democratic Party is at eye level with the middle class.

Soft money will find its way and seep into the political system and corrode it, unless we plug every hole.

I believe the war on terror is the vital discussion of this decade and of our generation, probably. To win the war on terror, you need a good offense and a good defense. On defense, I regret to say, basically, this administration has not come close to doing what is necessary.

A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure.

Whether you are a Democrat or Republican, whether you are a liberal or a conservative, we know that neither this President nor prior Presidents of both parties did everything right or we would not have had a 9/11.

When one has success, the answer is not to undo that success. It is to continue what has been done.

It is essential that all Americans take the time to honor and remember those individuals who gave their lives in defense of our liberty.

Giving up even an ounce of precious freedom is a very serious thing to do.

Anyone who thinks they have a monopoly on truth, and there is only one way to see the world, always gets us into trouble.

The 2014 election was not a repudiation of government in general.

Barack Obama knows that to create an economy built to last, we need to focus on middle-class families. Families who stay up on Sunday nights pacing the floor, like my dad did, while their children, tucked in bed, dream big dreams. Families who aren't sure what Monday morning will bring, but who believe our nation's best days are still ahead.

If we are going to stay a great power and I hope and pray we will we need the truth. We need to know what is going right and we need to know what is going wrong. There is no greater time than now.

You have to show Israel that it's not going to be forced to do things it doesn't want to do and can't do.

You have to walk in the other guy's moccasins. You have to think what they think. If you want to bring somebody onto your side, you have to figure out what motivates them. What do they need?

We tend to talk, Democrats, as a party, in legislative terms.

In a brave new world, a post-September 11 world, anyone is going to make certain mistakes. The mistakes that have been made on homeland security, on protecting our Nation from another terrorist attack, are mistakes of omission. We are simply not doing enough.

But these days there are a lot of younger people who would like to go into teaching but don't because the economic opportunities are sometimes elsewhere.

I told the President, I told Rahm Emanuel and others in the administration that I thought the policy they took to try to bring about negotiations is counter-productive, because when you give the Palestinians hope that the United States will do its negotiating for them, they are not going to sit down and talk.

Most of the people I meet who are on unemployment are people who have had jobs for 25 years, lost them; they've been knocking on doors every week.

Ideological warriors whether from the Left or the Right are bad news for the bench. They tend to make law, not interpret law. And that's not what any of us should want from our judges.

There are many reasons why Mitt Romney should not become president, but perhaps the most important of all is the narrowness of his experience, perspective and vision.

The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.

We need to make sure middle-class people are able to pay the bills. We need to make sure that poor people don't starve. Those are values, too.