Quotes from Barack Obama

I'm also hard at work on plans for the Obama Library. And some have suggested that we put it in my birthplace, but I'd rather keep it in the United States. Did anybody not see that joke coming? Show of hands.

I just had a stroke and it was pretty epic

I gotta say, boss," he told me, "that was some real gangster shit back there.

In uncertain times, Mr. President," the prime minister said, "the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it's not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.

But know this America: we will meet them

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.

we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.

It had been more than a month since Donald Trump had inserted himself into the national political dialogue. My advisors and I had assumed that, having milked it for all it was worth, the media would gradually tire of his obsession with my birth. And yet, like algae in a stagnant pond, the number of stories on his conspiratorial musings proliferated with each passing week.

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

if you're thinking: 'Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?' — then you're going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you'll always have a path. There's always something to be done.

maybe politics could be less about power and positioning and more about community and connection.

I suffered rejections and insults often enough to stop fearing them. In other words, I grew up—and got my sense of humor back.

For us to respond in that way to hateful speech... we empower the worst of us .. to create chaos around the world.

will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.

A change happens because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

But whatever their motives, they would all at some point confess a common weariness, a weariness that was bone-deep. They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage. The idea of responsibility—their own, that of others—slowly eroded, replaced with gallows humor and low expectations.

Getting things done meant subjecting yourself to criticism, and the alternative—playing it safe, avoiding controversy, following the polls—was not only a recipe for mediocrity but a betrayal of the hopes of those citizens who'd put you in office.

We didn't just love each other and make each other laugh and share the same basic values—there was symmetry there, the way we complemented each other. We could have each other's back, guard each other's blind spots. We could be a team. Of course, that was another way of saying we were very different, in experience and in temperament.

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless.

A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together, but for most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, argument, and persuasion which allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices – not only about the means to our ends, but also the ends themselves.

And there was the time Paul McCartney serenaded my wife with "Michelle." She laughed, a little embarrassed, as the rest of the audience applauded, and I wondered what Michelle's parents would have said back in 1965, the year the song came out, if someone had knocked on the door of their South Side home and told them that someday the Beatle who wrote it would be singing it to their daughter from a White House stage.

Hope and change were a luxury, folks seemed to be telling us, exotic imports that would wilt in the heat.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.