Thank you so much. Everyone please be seated. And welcome to the White House. Some of you have been here before. (Laughter)

This is one of the things that I most look forward to every year. It's a chance to meet with - and, more importantly, honor - some of the most extraordinary people in America - and around the world.

President Kennedy once said, during a tribute to the poet Robert Frost, that a nation reveals itself not only by the men and women it produces, but by the men and women that it honors; the people that it remembers. I heartily agree. When you look at the men and women who are here today, it says something about who we are as a people.

When we award this medal to a Congressman John Lewis, it says that we aspire to be a more just, more equal, more perfect union. When we award it to a Jasper Johns, it says we value the original and the imaginative. When we award it to a Warren Buffett, it says we'd all like to be so humble and wise - and maybe make a little money along the way. (Laughter) And when we award it to former President George H.W. Bush, it says we celebrate an extraordinary life of service and of sacrifice.

This year's Medal of Freedom recipients reveal the best of who we are and who we aspire to be. In 1970, John Adams and a handful of unpaid attorneys and law students salvaged some old desks and set up an environmental law firm in New York City. For 36 years, John sat at the same desk. But the group he co-founded, the Natural Resources Defense Council, grew well beyond it.