Quotes from Barack Obama

when what felt like a wide distribution of probable outcomes narrows to the inevitable.

I started thinking about the struggles and disappointments he had seen in his life. I started to appreciate his need to feel respected in his own home. I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but for him it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard to his feeling s or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.

I was discovering, the difficulty of competing in a game where there were no clearly defined rules, a game in which your opponents are not merely trying to put a ball through a basket or push it across your goal line, but are instead trying to convince the broad public—at least implicitly, more often explicitly—that in matters of judgment, intelligence, values, and character, they are more worthy than you.

Le problème au milieu d'une telle panique financière et dans une économie capitaliste moderne, c'est qu'il était impossible de faire la distinction entre les bonnes et les mauvaises entreprises, ou de ne châtier que les irresponsables et les crapuleux. Que cela nous plaise ou non, nous étions tous dans le même bateau.

I listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their formative years to hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state.

Havel, as much as anyone, had given moral voice to the grassroots democracy movements that had brought the Soviet era to an end. Along with Nelson Mandela and a handful of other living statesmen, he'd also been a distant role model for me.

You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

On top of my sorrow, I felt a great shame.

hide your strength and bide your time.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't, end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe

Why can't I just eat my waffle...

I remember looking at my calendar and realizing that over a span of a year and a half, I had taken exactly seven days off. The rest of the time I had typically worked twelve to sixteen hours a day.

unwillingness to make hard choices and live up to our own ideals doesn't just undermine U.S. credibility in the eyes of the world. It undermines the U.S. government's credibility with the American people.

este libro es para esos jóvenes: una invitación a rehacer el mundo una vez más, y hacer realidad, a base de esfuerzo, determinación y una gran dosis de imaginación, unos Estados Unidos que por fin reflejen todo lo mejor que llevamos dentro.

That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do.

How many of us are tested in that way, asked to risk careers we've long dreamed of in the service of some greater good?

You're too important for me to take no as an answer

I'd asked our economic team to develop legislative reforms that would make a future crisis less likely. As far as Rahm was concerned, the sooner we got such a "Wall Street reform" bill drafted and up for a vote, the better. "It puts us back on the side of the angels," he said. "And if the Republicans try to block it, we'll shove it up their ass.

a sign of things to come, a larger, darker reality in which partisan affiliation and political expedience would threaten to blot out everything—your previous positions; your stated principles; even what your own senses, your eyes and ears, told you to be true.

but an enterprising microbrewer in the Navy Mess suggested that we could use the honey in a beer recipe, which led to the purchase of a home brew kit and made me the first presidential brewmaster. (George Washington, I was told, made his own whiskey.)

But as al-Qaeda had scattered and gone underground, metastasizing into a complex web of affiliates, operatives, sleeper cells, and sympathizers connected by the internet and burner phones, our national security agencies had been challenged to construct new forms of more targeted, nontraditional warfare—including operating an arsenal of lethal drones to take out al-Qaeda operatives within the territory of Pakistan.

In other words, FDR understood that to be effective, governance couldn't be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics: You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn't.

well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government

That was the best of the American spirit, I thought--having the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control--and therefore responsibility--over our own fate.