Everybody in America is going to have to sacrifice to help us rebuild the Gulf Coast. Every government program, every individual, we are all going to have to sacrifice.

It's counterintuitive, but the most divisive arrangement is when the same party controls both Congress and the presidency, a situation encountered in eight of the past 10 years. With government unified under a single party, the minority has the least possible incentive to cooperate with the majority.

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

Unfortunately, corruption is widespread in government agencies and public enterprises. Our political system promotes nepotism and wasting money. This has undermined our legal system and confidence in the functioning of the state. One of the consequences is that many citizens don't pay their taxes.

We campaigned on the fact that we were going to have to take difficult decisions because of the state of the public finances. When we got into government we discovered that actually the public finances were in an even worse state than we thought.