And that is that we have never been: a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it. And that's who we need to remain.
If we want to save our country, we must all realize that the breakdown of our culture is trapping millions of people in a cycle of poverty and dependence, and together, we have to do something about it.
My first job paid well for a young attorney. I was making over $50,000, which was more than either of my parents had ever made. I thought I was rich.
It has become starkly apparent to me that we lack any sort of strategic foreign policy view, and when I say 'we,' I mean the country in general, but in particular, the Republican Party.
One of the reasons people feel so alienated from the American political process is in the fights we get in here in Washington, no one's ever talking about them and the challenges they're going through.
There's no doubt that when the Republican Party took over in 1994, the 'Contract with America' was an opportunity to implement some things - like welfare reform and some of the other initiatives. Then, it kind of lost its steam.
When you talk about entitlement programs, it's not just about - it's not about cutting those programs. It is about saving those programs. Those programs are on a path of fiscal unsustainability.
We all have our problems and we are working to find a solution to ours and also to help the eurozone. We expect that other countries should do the same, that they be prudent in their statements.
Ever since Darwin, we've been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.
Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.
The challenge of global warming should stimulate a whole raft of manifestly benign innovations - for conserving energy and generating it by 'clean' means (biofuels, innovative renewables, carbon sequestration, and nuclear fusion).
The images of Earth's delicate biosphere, contrasting with the sterile moonscape where the astronauts left their footsteps, have become iconic for environmentalists: these may indeed be the Apollo programme's most enduring legacy.
It is foolish to claim, as some do, that emigration into space offers a long-term escape from Earth's problems. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest.
Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
What we have, what we wish we had - ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed, investments won, investments lost, elections won, elections lost - these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us.
I don't doubt for a second that Neil Armstrong's spirit is still with us: that unique blend of optimism, humility and the utter confidence that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.
The America we all know has been a story of the many becoming one, uniting to preserve liberty, uniting to build the greatest economy in the world, uniting to save the world from unspeakable darkness.
There will always be, within a party, people who backed one candidate versus people who backed another, and there will be factions in the party, and there's always a little glee faction looking at the difficulty of the other faction.
I care about America. I care about the people that can't find jobs. I care about my 20 grandkids and what kind of America they are going to have.
I recognize that as the guy who lost the election, I'm not in a position to tell everybody else how to win, all right? They're not going to listen, and I don't have the credibility to do that anyway.
When I was elected governor of my state, I had a legislature 87 percent Democrat. It was not lost on me that to get anything done, I couldn't be attacking them. I had to find ways to reach out to them.
