"A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term."
"Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together."
"Centrism is bogus."
"Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms."
"You can't create a political movement out of pabulum."
"You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring."
"It's not government's business what people do in their private bedrooms."
"Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods."
"The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It's the party of non-voters."
"There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms."
"Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation."
"The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference."
"The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives."
"There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions."
"Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy."
"Our moral authority is as important, if not more important, than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority, not only in the Arab world but all over the world."
"A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important."
"I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration."
"We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives."
"True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going."
"We never used to blink at taking a leadership role in the world. And we understood leadership often required something other than drones and bombs. We accepted global leadership not just for humanitarian reasons, but also because it was in our own best interest. We knew we couldn't isolate ourselves from trouble. There was no place to hide."
"More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger."
"Media outlets that are exploiting Ebola because they want a sensational story and politicians using it to their own ends ought to be ashamed."
"Public fear isn't something to be played with."
"Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them."
