After a century of trying, we declared that healthcare in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody. After decades of talk, we finally began to wean ourselves off foreign oil. We doubled our production of clean energy. We brought more of our troops home to their families, and we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.

I said that America’s role would be limited; that we would not put ground troops into Libya; that we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation, and that we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners.

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

A precedent embalms a principle.

According to the law of nature it is only fair that no one should become richer through damages and injuries suffered by another.

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.

Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

I’ve never seen America as an imperialist or colonialist or meddling country.

Those who oppose reform will also tell you that under our plan, you won’t get to choose your doctor – that some bureaucrat will choose for you. That’s also not true.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.

We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

There’s 20 companies that I have investments in – some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.

Don’t bring your need to the marketplace, bring your skill. If you don’t feel well, tell your doctor, but not the marketplace. If you need money, go to the bank, but not the marketplace.

If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we’d think it’s a pretty serious problem. In fact, we’d probably go to war.

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.

The doctor who diagnosed me with ALS, or motor neuron disease, told me that it would kill me in two or three years.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

When I told my doctor I couldn’t afford an operation, he offered to touch-up my X-rays.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

The glamour of it all! New York! America!

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Each doctor makes a much, much more important job than I do, but at the end, nobody talks about him. We all know about it, but we don’t really think about it.

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

They certainly give very strange names to diseases.

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

I can barely walk, but it’s a privilege to be able to move at all.

I feel like a spoilt rapper. I get to pick and choose everything.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

I believe that of all the things I have done, exciting though many of them have been, there’s no doubt in my mind that the most worthwhile have been the establishing of schools and hospitals, and the rebuilding of monasteries in the mountains.

Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous.

It’s annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

I’m not gonna be bad at anything, and I want to actually be the best at anything I’m doing. So if I’m playing basketball, if I’m taking the SATs, like, there’s a competitive spirit behind it. With production, it’s the same thing.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.

This is America. You’re entitled to believe what you want.

We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Within the soul of America is freedom of mind and spirit in man. Here alone are the open windows through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit. Here alone is human dignity not a dream but an accomplishment. Perhaps it is not perfect, but it is more full in realization here than any other place in the world.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

The example that America knows how to govern itself is one of the compelling aspects of our national security.