I've told much of this story in these pages for a reason: not to relive a difficult past, but to remember how we changed the course of our country. Good people believed the world—at home and abroad—could be different and better. Citizens organized. People fought for something. We marched. We voted. We got knocked down and we got back up.
No, "the good old days weren't always good." That's not an insult to America, that's an affirmation of America: an America that makes itself stronger when, despite long odds and searing setbacks, everyday citizens stand up and decide that the way things are isn't the way things have to be.

My life has been a story of faith in America tested and redeemed not by being passive, but by being passionate about our country and its promise. It is the story of a journey begun in the latter half of the twentieth century and lived now in the morning of the twenty-first: two different eras of staggering transformation in how we live, learn, work and relate to each other, two different eras where old assumptions were constantly challenged and confounded and when faith in institutions came under intense scrutiny. This is also a story about how we listen and how we learn, how we face problems, how we try to embrace a vision of the future that meets our best hopes and aspirations.
In the end, I believe it is a story of optimism, but clearly a story that doesn't unfold on autopilot. It's not an automatic. It's optimism earned the hard way.
. . ..
All of this recounting and retelling also reminded me that the world has always been complicated. Truly complicated. Leaders have always been imperfect, some even downright malevolent, others too small for the moment. The fight at home has always been a struggle.That is what makes me all the more optimistic about today: because I've seen with my own eyes that the institutions the Founders created to hold America together have worked best when America needed them the most. I have the scars to prove it, and I know that while we've often faced daunting challenges, in the end, we have met them. I'm an optimist because America has a pretty good, 242-year record of turning difficult passages into landmark progress.

. .

Why this book and why now? Not just because I have finished my time as secretary of state and in the Senate, but because the causes that have defined my life until now have never been more at risk. Our democracy is challenged. But I remain confident in our ability to reclaim it because our democracy is as alive as any person who lives in it. It is constantly changing, growing and reinventing itself. But its well-being always—always—depends on citizens to keep it alive. The strength of the United States is derived not from a party, not from a leader, but from a natural resource that is truly renewable: the resolve of our citizens and their commitment to make the American ideal a reality.. . . If you take nothing else away from the American journey I describe in these pages, I hope it is this: there's nothing wrong with America and the world today that can't be fixed by what's right with our citizens and with people around the globe. As John Kennedy said when he sought and won the first breakthrough in nuclear arms control, "Our problems are man-made—therefore they can be solved by man."My hope is that as you finish reading these pages, you will believe more in the possibilities and less in the hurdles, and that more of you will dare to try more. . . Onward.