Quotes from Barack Obama

The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Donot wait for good things to happen to you.If you out and make some good things happen,you will fill the world with hope,you will fill yourself with hope.

Then Elie spoke, describing how in 1945—paradoxically—he had emerged from the camp feeling hopeful about the future. Hopeful, he said, because he assumed that the world had surely learned once and for all that hatred was useless and racism stupid and "the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations…is meaningless.

practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other's choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals

a report would surface from the Pentagon or Langley, recommending that U.S. policy pay more attention to human rights and governance issues when dealing with our Middle East partners. But then the Saudis would deliver a vital tip that kept an explosive device from being loaded onto U.S.-bound cargo planes or our naval base in Bahrain would prove critical in managing a flare-up with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, and those reports would be relegated to the bottom of a drawer.

Energy Department's Loan Guarantee Program would yield an impressive track record, helping innovative companies like the carmaker Tesla take their businesses to the next level.

They didn't seem concerned by the fact that for every "loser" who had bought more house than he could afford, there were twenty folks who had lived within their means but were now suffering the fallout from Wall Street's bad bets.

They chanted and stomped and swore to never leave

How appealing to common interests discounted the continuing effects of discrimination and allowed whites to avoid taking the full measure of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and their own racial attitudes. How this left Black people with a psychic burden, expected as they were to constantly swallow legitimate anger and frustration in the name of some far-off ideal.

her eyes narrowed as she searched my face like a doctor examining a patient for symptoms.

there were those who argued that government should not interject itself into civil society, that no law could force white people to associate with blacks. Upon hearing these arguments, Dr. King replied, "It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.

If more people spoke up, perhaps things might change.

Marvin had held a variety of jobs, from golf caddy to bartender at a strip club, before landing work as John Kerry's body man four years earlier. It's a strange role, the body man: a personal assistant and jack-of-all-trades responsible for making sure that the candidate has everything he or she needs to function, whether a favorite snack or a couple of Advil, an umbrella when it's wet or a scarf when it's cold

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.

Indifference is exactly what cynical politicians want from you. They're counting on it. Their success depends on convincing you that your vote doesn't matter.

troubling of all, our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis—a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be; a crisis that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted.

America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won't promise that now. Yes, our path is harder – but it leads to a better place. Yes our road is longer – but we travel it together. We don't turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up. We draw strength from our victories, and we learn from our mistakes...

Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety. The suggestion that I hadn't been born in the United States wasn't new. At least one conservative crank had pushed the theory as far back as my Senate race in Illinois.

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. Then there are people who do the opposite; who are able to imagine how others must feel, and make sure that they don't do things that hurt people. Which kind of person do you want to be?

For the next fifty years the filibuster was used only sparingly—most notably by southern Democrats attempting to block anti-lynching and fair-employment bills or other legislation that threatened to shake up Jim Crow.

that it wasn't just an exercise in vanity or ambition but rather a part of an unbroken chain of progress.

The Kennedys decided we're going to do an airlift. We're going to go out to Africa and we're going to start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so that they can learn what a wonderful country America is. And this young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. Truth: His father came to America at least a year before this program started.

indifferent to small details, incapable of maintaining an orderly filing system, constantly misplacing memos, pens, and cell phones that had just been handed to me

inaction and acrimony while the planet slowly burned.

For most of the twentieth century, for most Americans, the what and why of our national defense seemed pretty straightforward. We lived with the possibility of being attacked by another great power, or being drawn into a conflict between great powers, or having America's vital interests—as defined by the wise men in Washington—threatened by some foreign actor. After