One of the things that you learn, having been in this [President's] office for four years, is the old adage of Abraham Lincoln's. That with public opinion there's nothing you can't do and without public opinion there's very little you can get done.
Politics comes and goes, but your principles don't. And everybody wants to be loved -- not everybody. ... You never heard anybody say, 'I want to be despised, I'm running for office.'
If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.
I'm harmless. I don't have any ill will or ill thought towards anybody. When people know you're that way, you can say stuff that the creepy guy at your office could never get away with.
The capital gains tax is 15 percent now. So I sit there in my office and I make a lot of money by capital gains, and I pay 15 percent, and I pay no payroll tax on it.
All I care about is making sure that I leave behind an America that is stronger, more prosperous, more stable, more secure than it was when I came into office and that's going to continue to drive me.
The post-office is a wonderful establishment! The regularity and dispatch of it! If one thinks of all that it has to do, and all that it does so well, it is really astonishing!