Quotes from Barack Obama

The idea that our common humanity mattered more than our differences was stitched into my DNA.

None of These Will Come Easy.

Look. You can't plan out your life. What you have to do is first discover your passion—what you really care about.

Beautiful, aren't they?" Dr. Collier said. "They really are." "The change comes later. In about five years, although it seems like it's coming sooner all the time." "What change is that?" "When their eyes stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they've shut off something inside.

Tom Donilon walked in to brief me on a developing situation involving an issue I'd never been asked about during the campaign. "Pirates?" "Pirates, Mr. President," Jones said. "Off the coast of Somalia. They boarded a cargo ship captained by an American and appear to be holding the crew hostage.

He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think—the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised.

Throughout our history, education has been at the heart of a bargain this nation makes with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility, you'll have a chance for a better life.

I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.

Issues are never simple. One thing I'm proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

faith can fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility, and the sense of reverence all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

My liberty depends on you being free, too.

What's the trick? the man asks. The trick is not caring that it hurts.

Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I'd become troubled by questions.

To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear. Burdens

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

Kalau mereka tidak berakar pada tradisi mereka sendiri, mereka tak akan mampu menghargai kebudayaan orang lain.

What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Finally, I wanted to tell a more personal story that might inspire young people considering a life in public service; how my career in politics really started with a search for a place to fit in. A way to explain the different strands of my mixed up heritage and how it was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.

the world was shrinking, sympathies changing;

I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around congress.

Don't you know who I am? I'm an individual!           I

I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

Through them, I discovered a community of faith—that it was okay to doubt, to question, and still reach for something beyond the here and now.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works