Quotes from Barack Obama

I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack though

there are people in the world who think only about themselves. They don't care what happens to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves feel important.

In their heroic efforts—going door-to-door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs—I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up. This was true democracy at work—democracy not as a gift from on high, or a division of spoils between interest groups, but rather democracy that was earned, the work of everybody.

I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up. This was true democracy at work—democracy not as a gift from on high, or a division of spoils between interest groups, but rather democracy that was earned, the work of everybody.

Still, I couldn't shake the fear that Putin's way of doing business had more force and momentum than I cared to admit, that in the world as it was, many of these hopeful activists might soon be marginalized or crushed by their own government—and there'd be very little I could do to protect them.

Goddamn it, Rahm, slow down—your ass is in my face!

Oh, how earnest I was then—how fierce and humorless! When I look back on my journal entries from this time, I feel a great affection for the young man that I was, aching to make a mark on the world, wanting to be a part of something grand and idealistic, which evidence seemed to indicate did not exist.

Operation Ajax set a pattern for U.S. miscalculation in dealing with developing countries that lasted throughout the Cold War: mistaking nationalist aspirations for Communist plots; equating commercial interests with national security; subverting democratically elected governments and aligning ourselves with autocrats when we determined it was to our benefit.

The substance of patriotism matters more than the symbols.

There was poetry as well – a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask

Voting is the best revenge. 2012

Part of what's so powerful about this performance is it reminds us of the vital, crazy, kinetic energy that's at the heart of America--that people who have a vision and a set of ideals can transform the world., Every single step of progress that we've made has been based on this notion that people can come together, and ideas can move like electricity though them, and a world can change

The mood on the plane was bittersweet.

She's happy now she's met someone. And I have my work." "Is that enough?" "Sometimes.

I resolved the lingering questions of my racial identity. For it turned out there was no single way to be Black; just trying to be a good man was enough.

The responsibility of tackling these problems didn't scare me. In fact, I relished the chance. But from everything I was learning, things were likely to get significantly worse before they got better.

In this new, curiously sealed habitat of mine, the fondness and trust I felt toward those I worked with and the kindness and support they showed me and my family were a saving grace. This was true for Ray Rogers and Quincy Jackson, the two young navy valets assigned to the Oval Office, who served refreshments to visitors and whipped up a solid lunch for me every day in the tiny kitchenette wedged next to the dining space.

He was an erudite man and began our conversation with a history of slave religion, telling me about the Africans who, newly landed on hostile shoes, had sat circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most radical of ideas – survival, and freedom, and hope.

But I did find refuge in books. The reading habit was my mother's doing, instilled early in my childhood—her go-to move anytime I complained of boredom, or when she couldn't afford to send me to the international school in Indonesia, or when I had to accompany her to the office because she didn't have a babysitter. Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.

As far as I was concerned, the election didn't prove that our agenda had been wrong. It just proved that—whether for lack of talent, cunning, charm, or good fortune—I'd failed to rally the nation, as FDR had once done, behind what I knew to be right. Which to me was just as damning.

That one trip gave me a glimpse of the dizzying freedom of the open road, how vast America was, and how full of wonder.

I bore daily witness to the seemingly cramped lives of my grandparents, the disappointments they filled with TV and liquor and sometimes a new appliance or car.

Our destiny is not written for us, but by us.

the weather had quickly turned cold and dark, an arctic wind stripping the trees bare of leaves, as if the unusually mild weather we had enjoyed on election night had been merely part of an elaborate set