Quotes from Barack Obama

Other Arab leaders quickly echoed these sentiments, spurred in part by editorializing from Al Jazeera, the Qatari-controlled media outlet that had become the dominant news source in the region, having built its popularity by fanning the flames of anger and resentment among Arabs with the same algorithmic precision that Fox News deployed so skillfully with conservative white voters in the States.

El mundo es complicado, Bar. Por eso es interesante.»

To claim otherwise, to insist that our safety and our standing in the world required us to do all that we could for as long as we could in every single instance, was an abdication of moral responsibility, the certainty it offered a comforting lie.

Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.

Why can't I just eat a waffle?

It was the sort of change that's important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so briefly, held in your hand.

But it would save somebody's mom out there, somewhere down the line. And that was worth fighting for.

Not only did Americans tend to be skeptical of oil companies, but BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, was a walking PR disaster—stating in the media that the spill involved a "relatively tiny" amount of oil in "a very big ocean"; arguing in another interview that no one wanted to see the hole plugged more than him because "I'd like my life back"; and generally living up to every stereotype of the arrogant, out-of-touch multinational executive.

As we sat in the afternoon sun, he gave me a quick tutorial on the burgeoning subprime mortgage market. Whereas banks had once typically held the mortgage loans they made in their own portfolios, a huge percentage of mortgages were now bundled and sold as securities on Wall Street. Since banks could now off-load their risk that any particular borrower might default on their loan, this "securitization" of mortgages had led banks to steadily loosen their lending standards.

I couldn't help but think about the daily fighting that continued to consume Iraq and Afghanistan and all the cruelty and suffering and injustice that my administration had barely even begun to deal with. The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to such chaos seemed laughable; on some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion.

Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads.

All of which underscores perhaps the most profound shift in Indonesia—the growth of militant, fundamentalist Islam in the country.

I know what it's like to be in a system that's unfair. I know what it's like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn't happen. But I can't let that shape my choices, and neither should you.

We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. He seemed to inhabit a world of hard surfaces and well-defined thoughts.

forty-two presidents.

Cooperate with the Obama administration at your own peril. And if you have to shake his hand, make sure you don't look happy about it.

In a 2003 poll, most Indonesians had a higher opinion of Osama bin Laden than they did of George W. Bush.

My mother-in-law never complained about anything. Whenever I interacted with her, I'd remember that, no matter what kind of mess I was dealing with, no one had forced me to be the president and that I needed to just suck it up and do my job.

a president wasn't a lawyer or an accountant or a pilot, hired to carry out some narrow, specialized task. Mobilizing public opinion, shaping working coalitions—that was the job. Whether I liked it or not, people were moved by emotion, not facts. To elicit the best rather than the worst of those emotions, to buttress those better angels of our nature with reason and sound policy, to perform while still speaking the truth—that was the bar I needed to clear. —

It's hard, in retrospect, to understand why you did something stupid. I don't mean the small stuff—ruining your favorite tie because you tried to eat soup in the car or throwing out your back because you got talked into playing tackle football on Thanksgiving. I mean dumb choices in the wake of considerable deliberation: those times when you identify a real problem in your life, analyze it, and then with utter confidence come up with precisely the wrong answer

Then suddenly a shot of my face flashed up on the TV screen and ABC News announced that I would be the forty-fourth president of the United States.

history was sure to run along its predetermined course, an endless cycle of fear, hunger and conflict, dominance and weakness?

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.

Michelle's tastes and mine often diverged: She preferred rom-coms, while according to her, my favorite movies usually involved "terrible things happening to people, and then they die.