Quotes from Barack Obama

I wasn't great. My stump speech was stiff, heavy on policy speak, short on inspiration and humor. I also found it awkward to talk about myself. As an organizer, I'd been trained to always stay in the background.

I had never intended the book to serve as a campaign manifesto; I just wanted to present my ideas about the current state of American politics in an interesting way and sell enough copies to justify my sizable advance.

was nice to know, as one executive assured us, that without the Recovery Act "the entire solar and wind industry in the U.S. would've probably been wiped out." That didn't stop me from wondering how long we could keep championing policies that paid long-term dividends but still somehow resulted in us getting clobbered over the head. —

Whereas many felt burdened by the workload, for me days spent in the library—or, better yet, on the couch of my off-campus apartment, a ball game on with the sound muted—felt like an absolute luxury after three years of organizing community meetings and knocking on doors in the cold.

From the moment he'd been elected Speaker in January, John Boehner had insisted that House Republicans had every intention of following through on their campaign pledge to end what he called my "job-crushing spending binge of the last two years.

I would often surprise people by citing George H. W. Bush as a recent president whose foreign policy I admired. Bush, along with James Baker, Colin Powell, and Brent Scowcroft, had deftly managed the end of the Cold War and the successful prosecution of the Gulf War.

And gosh, I wasn't a great athlete. I wasn't big and strong. But I had two things going for me. I could take a punch. And I didn't give up.

At the same time, conservatives weren't wrong to think that in their personal attitudes the majority of news reporters probably fell at the more liberal end of the political spectrum.

the months to come, I'd think back often to my dinner with Abbas and Netanyahu, Mubarak and King Abdullah, the pantomime of it, their lack of resolve. To insist that the old order in the Middle East would indefinitely hold, to believe that the children of despair wouldn't revolt, at some point, against those who maintained it—that, it turned out, was the greatest illusion of all. —

Nevertheless, the noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister—even one who presided over a fragile coalition government—exacted a domestic political cost that simply didn't exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.

whenever I write a letter to a family who has lost a loved one in Iraq, or read an email from a constituent who has dropped out of college because her student aid has been cut, I'm reminded that the actions of those in power have enormous consequences—a price that they themselves almost never have to pay.

I began to understand the true nature of my adversary.

I figure if it works, we get through this. If it doesn't, we probably lose. But either way, I'll be saying what I believe.

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. The result was not just a change in material conditions but a sense of dignity for people and communities, a bond between those who had once seemed far apart.

In some ways the soviets simplified who the enemy was", Havel said, "Today autocrats are more sophisticated, they stand for election while slowly undermining institutions that make democracy possible. They champion free markets while engaging with the same corruption cronyism and exploitation that existed in the past.

Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?

If you believed in climate science, then the carbon dioxide pouring out of automobile tailpipes clearly qualified as air pollution.

After we're finished, we should try something simpler," I said to him one day. "We could move our families to Hawaii and open a smoothie stand on the beach." "Smoothies are too complicated," Rahm said. "We'll sell T-shirts. But just white T-shirts. In medium. That's it—no other colors or patterns or sizes. We don't want to have to make any decisions. If customers want something different, they can go someplace else.

Cynicism is a choice, and hope is a better choice.

I was reminded once again that for Wen and the rest of China's leaders, foreign policy remained purely transactional. How much they gave and how much they got would depend not on abstract principles of international law but on their assessment of the other side's power and leverage. Where they met no resistance, they'd keep on taking.

a part of me was frustrated with the constant need to soften for white folks' benefit the blunt truths about race in this country

How useful is it to describe the world as it should be when efforts to achieve that world are bound to fall short?

Confidence. The secret to a man's success.

In the battle for Russia's identity, fear and fatalism usually beat out hope and change.