To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
Over more than a decade, Iran had moved ahead with its nuclear program. And before the deal, it had installed nearly 20,000 centrifuges that could enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb.
The future must not belong to those who bully women. It must be shaped by girls who go to school and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons.
As tough as things have been, I am convinced you are tougher. I've seen your passion and I've seen your service. I've seen you engage and I've seen you turn out in record numbers. I've heard your voices amplified by creativity and a digital fluency that those of us in older generations can barely comprehend. I've seen a generation eager, impatient even, to step into the rushing waters of history and change its course.
I always believe that ultimately, if people are paying attention, then we get good government and good leadership. And when we get lazy, as a democracy and civically start taking shortcuts, then it results in bad government and politics.
In the first two years, when I had a strong majority in the House and the Senate, we were as productive as any administration has been since the '60s. I mean, we got a lot done.
In the eyes of God, a child on the other side of the border is no less worthy of love and compassion than my own child. We - we can't distinguish between them in terms of their worth and their inherent dignity and that they're deserving of shelter and love and education and opportunity. We can't isolate ourselves. We can't hide behind a wall.
I think the big challenge that we've got on education is making sure that from kindergarten or prekindergarten through your 14th or 15th year of school, or 16th year of school, or 20th year of school, that you are actually learning the kinds of skills that make you competitive and productive in a modern, technological economy.
The problem is, that we've got a position, often times by the NRA that says any regulation whatsoever is the camel's nose under the tent. And that, I think, is not where the American people are at.
When you've got little kids, and you're tucking them in. When you open a door and they're in their pajamas and they're, you know, wrestling with you and asking you, you know, to read to them and stuff, [The white House] starts feeling like home pretty quick. Not to mention having a mother-in-law upstairs, and the dog, and now two.
I became a lightning rod for some partisan battles. I could not be prouder of the track record we've put together. By almost every measure, the country is significantly better off than when I came in.
No, you can't deny women their basic rights and pretend it's about your 'religious freedom'. If you don't like birth control, don't use it. Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.