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The greatness of Americans is that we are mosaic - we are diverse.

Diversity of thought and culture and religion and ideas has been the strength of America.

America is this incredible mosaic of immigrants, so people really want to be anchored in some kind of culture as well as the one they are living in.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society - in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage.

The essence of America - that which really unites us - is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion - it is an idea - and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.

The American Way is an amalgam of our compassion, our strengths, our failings and our attempts to build a better world, a more perfect union.

There's something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice.

America is a living idea. It isn't only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make America. Seeking to preserve and enshrine one vision of this country from one period of its past robs it of what makes it magical: its infinite possibility for adjustment.