Quotes from Barack Obama

Maybe nothing would come of my Cairo speech. Maybe the dysfunction of the Middle East would play itself out regardless of what I did. Maybe the best we could hope for was to placate men like Mubarak and kill those who would try to kill us. Maybe, as the Pyramids had whispered, none of it mattered in the long run. But on the only scale that any of us can truly comprehend, the span of centuries, the actions of an American president sixty-five years earlier had set the world on a better course.

I was actually doing in my life. I was like a young Walter Mitty; a Don Quixote with no Sancho Panza.

justifying the past mattered less than planning what to do next.

The thing about getting old, Bar," Toot had told me, "is that you're the same person inside." I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. "You're trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it's still you. You understand?

It was my turn to speak. I told the stories of a few of the men we had come to honor. "Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman," I concluded. "It has always been up to us." Turning back to look at the old men sitting behind me on the stage, I believed this to be true.

Until those basic human responses that normally govern our daily lives—honesty, empathy, courtesy, patience, goodwill—feel like weakness when extended to the other side.

Magic beans, baby. Magic beans.

For war was contradiction, as was the history of America.

Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.

that spirit of liberty didn't extend, in the minds of the Founders, to the slaves who worked their fields, made their beds, and nursed their children.

I've learned to place my faith in my fellow citizens, especially those of the next generation, whose conviction in the equal worth of all people seems to come as second nature, and who insist on making real those principles that their parents and teachers told them were true but perhaps never fully believed themselves.

be known. To be heard. To have one's unique identity recognized and seen as worthy. It was a universal human desire, I thought, as true for nations and peoples as it was for individuals.

Mr. President-Elect," she said, "this is your holy-shit moment.

President Bush would end up doing all he could to make the eleven weeks between my election and his departure go smoothly.

To have that rare chance, reserved for very few, to bend history in a better direction.

too much focus on civil rights, police misconduct, or other issues considered specific to Black people risked triggering suspicion, if not a backlash, from the broader electorate.

I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. 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. That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does.

He feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India's main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

And in that moment, I had the strongest wish to sit beside him and talk. To ask him where he'd found the strength and imagination to do so much with so very little. To ask how he'd recovered from disappointment.

I hope you don't mind me asking, Your Majesty," I said, "but how do you keep up with twelve wives?" "Very badly," he said, shaking his head wearily. "One of them is always jealous of the others. It's more complicated than Middle East politics.

But the idea of America, the promise of America: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even me. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"—that was my America. The America Tocqueville wrote about, the countryside of Whitman and Thoreau, with no person my inferior or my better; the America of pioneers heading west in search of a better life or immigrants landing on Ellis Island, propelled by a yearning for freedom.

Michelle was someone who started from the heart and not the head, from experience rather than abstractions.

If I were to travel back in time, I might urge the young man I was to set the books aside for a minute, open the windows, and let in some fresh air (my smoking habit was then in full bloom). I'd tell him to relax, go meet some people, and enjoy the pleasures that life reserves for those in their twenties.

the financial markets had helped accelerate the offshoring of jobs and the concentration of wealth in a handful of cities and economic sectors