Quotes from Barack Obama

As Tim aptly described it, Larry could hear your arguments, restate them better than you could, and then show why you were wrong.

You mean the Chaos Emeralds?

What an extraordinary privilege to be able to make the world better

how the incrementalism and decorum, the endless positioning for the next election, and the groupthink of cable news panels all conspired to chip away at your best instincts and wear down your independence, until whatever you once believed was utterly lost.

Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman. It has always been up to us.

Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it's bred indifference.

Every parent savors such moments, I suppose, when the world slows down, your strivings get pushed to the back of your mind, and all that matters is that you are present, fully, to witness the miracle of your child growing up.

We choose hope over fear. We see the future not as something out of our control, but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort.

Malcolm X avait formulé un jour, le voeu que le sang blanc qui coulait en lui (...) soit expurgé. (...) Mais en ce qui me concernait, je savais que dans mon cheminement vers le respect de moi-même, jamais je ne pourrais réduire mon propre sang blanc au rang de pure abstraction. Car que supprimerais-je en moi par la même occasion, si je devais laisser ma mère et mes grands-parents à la frontière d'un territoire inexploré ?

It went fine for us," I said. "But based on what I just saw, we better win this thing or the country is screwed.

This was it, I thought to myself. My inheritance. I rearranged the letters in a neat stack and set them under the registry book. Then I went out into the backyard. Standing before the two graves, I felt everything around me—the cornfields, the mango tree, the sky—closing in, until I was left with only a series of mental images, Granny's stories come to life.

I believed there was an essential bond between the Black and the Jewish experiences—a common story of exile and suffering that might ultimately be redeemed by a shared thirst for justice, a deeper compassion for others, a heightened sense of community

Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try to determine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speak out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the same sense of outrage that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.

Looking back, I realize I was doing what most of us tend to do when we're uncertain or floundering: We reach for what feels familiar, what we think we're good at.

If you are living life to its fullest, you will fail.

But she and my grandfather had no firm ideological or partisan leanings to speak of, beyond what they considered to be common sense.

As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.

What made it worse was the clueless attitude of the Wall Street executives whose collective asses we were pulling out of the fire. Just before I took office, for example, the leaders of most of the major banks had gone ahead and authorized more than a billion dollars in year-end bonuses for themselves and their lieutenants, despite having already received TARP funds to prop up their stock prices.

proof of people's capacity to harness ingenuity in the service of madness.

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect. A year passes and you know you feel differently, but you're not sure what or why or how, so your mind casts back for something that might give that difference shape: a word, a glance, a touch.

Such tenacity drove the entire White House staff. Denis McDonough at one point distributed stickers to everyone, emblazoned with the words FIGHT CYNICISM. This became a useful slogan, an article of our faith.

just as Angela Merkel's willingness to absorb the tragic lessons of her own nation's past made a difference.

AIPAC's clout could be brought to bear on virtually every congressional district in the country, and just about every politician in Washington—including me—counted AIPAC members among their key supporters and donors.