Quotes from Barack Obama

It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

until being black meant the knowledge of your own powerlessness., of your own defeat. And the final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.

Thanks for sticking with this," Axe said, his voice choked up. I put my arm around him, feeling my own emotions swell. "This is why we do the work," I said. "This. Right here.

But you don't choose the time. The time chooses you.

We just want to make sure you're treated like every other president," Von explained. "That's right," Buddy said. "See, you and the First Lady don't really know what this means to us, Mr. President. Having you here…" He shook his head. "You just don't know.

There are things more important," he told me, "than getting reelected.

It's what passes for wisdom, being ironic and cynical.

tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better.

If your next-door neighbor's house is on fire, you don't want the fire department dispatcher asking whether it was caused by lightning or by someone smoking in bed before agreeing to send a fire truck; you just want the fire put out before it reaches your house.

At times, I felt like the fisherman in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, sharks gnawing at my catch as I tried to tow it to shore. But as the weeks passed, the core of our reforms survived the amendment process remarkably intact.

In 1918, a strain of H1N1 that came to be known as "the Spanish flu" had infected an estimated half a billion people and killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million—roughly 4 percent of the world's population. In Philadelphia alone, more than 12,000 died in the span of a few weeks.

For folks in many parts of the world, the sight of a head of state making him- or herself accessible for direct questioning from citizens was a novelty—and a more meaningful argument for democracy than any lecture I might give.

What made some movements succeed where others failed? Was it a sign of success when portions of a cause were absorbed by conventional politics, or was it a sign that the cause had been hijacked? When was compromise acceptable and when was it selling out, and

If we won, it would mean that I wasn't alone in believing that the world didn't have to be a cold, unforgiving place, where the strong preyed on the weak and we inevitably fell back into clans and tribes, lashing out against the unknown and huddling against the darkness

The stubborn embrace of austerity by key European leaders, despite all of the contrary evidence, was more than a little frustrating.

You gave them hope." "They need more than hope," I said.

My mother reinforced this affinity for the natural world. In the grandeur of its design—the skeleton of a leaf, the labors of an ant colony, the glow of a bleach-white moon—she experienced the wonder and humility that others reserved for religious worship, and in our youth, she'd lectured Maya and me about the damage humans could inflict when they were careless in building cities or drilling oil or throwing away garbage.

As much as Tim blamed himself during the next morning's postmortem, I recognized it as a systems failure

The United States, under Reagan, cynically tried to have it both ways, publicly backing Iraq while secretly selling arms to Iran.)

A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide—a moving, tightly reasoned discussion of America's lackluster response to genocide and the need for stronger global leadership in preventing mass atrocities.

While campaigning, Michelle—whose great-great-grandfather had been born into slavery on a South Carolina rice plantation—would hear well-meaning Black women suggesting that losing an election might be better than losing a husband, the implication being that if I was elected, I was sure to be shot.

I signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It was a significant triumph: the most sweeping change to the rules governing America's financial sector since the New Deal.

Duty compels us to care about people that we will never meet.