I have never been more hopeful about our future. I haven never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism. The kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead, or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines, or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us. So long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

-Barack Obama