Quotes from Barack Obama

there's good crazy and bad crazy

I took my first tentative steps with my eyes closed, down, up, my arms swinging, the voices lifting. And I hear him still: As I follow my father into the sound, he lets out a quick shout, bright and high, a shout that leaves much behind and reaches out for more, a shout that cries for laughter.

More than anything, though, my fascination with India had to do with Mahatma Gandhi. Along with Lincoln, King, and Mandela, Gandhi had profoundly influenced my thinking.

The thing about getting old, Bar," Toot had told me, "is that you're the same person inside.

CONTRARY TO THE BELIEFS of many in the Arab world (and more than a few American reporters), the United States is not a grand puppet master whimsically pulling the strings of the countries with which it does business.

Whatever you don't won't be enough. Try anyway.

His eyes glowed inward as he spoke, the eyes of a madman or a saint.

After 9/11, counterterrorism took center stage. In pursuing each of these goals, we'd made autocrats our allies. They were predictable, after all, and committed to keeping a lid on things. They hosted our military bases and cooperated with us on counterterrorism efforts. And, of course, they did lots of business with U.S. companies.

I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration's choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.

But when it came to actual policy—when I asked GOP leaders what exactly they proposed to help drive down medical costs, protect people with preexisting conditions, and cover thirty million Americans who couldn't otherwise get insurance—their answers were as threadbare as Chuck Grassley's had been during his visit to the Oval months before. I'm

WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.

The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please. For what man, if not my own father, has the power to tell me otherwise? Whatever I do, it seems, I won't do much worse than he did.

That evening, after she'd run me through an exhaustive list of U.S. foreign policy errors that she insisted needed correcting, I suggested she might want to get out of the ivory tower and work with me for a spell.

And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone.

The work remained arduous and sometimes monotonous, made tougher by the need to patch leaks and bail water. Maintaining speed and course in the constantly shifting winds and currents required patience, skill, and attention. But for a span of time, we had in us the thankfulness of survivors, propelled in our daily tasks by a renewed belief that we might make it to port after all.

there is a certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do, someone will be angry at you

Honest, decent men and women with attainable ambitions, and the determination to see those ambitions through.

honesty, and hard work, and empathy

Still, for both policy and political reasons, I felt that progressives couldn't afford to ignore economics. Those of us who believed in the government's ability to solve big problems had an obligation to pay attention to the real-world impact of our decisions and not just trust in the goodness of our intentions.

Accepting that African Americans and other minority groups might need extra help from the government—that their specific hardships could be traced to a brutal history of discrimination rather than immutable characteristics or individual choices—required a level of empathy, of fellow feeling, that many white voters found difficult to muster.

that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldn't be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaign - and by extension a democracy - proved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.

They deserved a victory lap, I thought to myself, a moment of pure elation. Which is why, even as I quieted the crowd and dove into my speech, I didn't have the heart to correct those well-meaning chanters—to remind them that in the year 2008, with the Confederate flag and all it stood for still hanging in front of a state capitol just a few blocks away, race still mattered plenty, as much as they might want to believe otherwise.

There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father's before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us.

Many of the veteran diplomats and experts they talked to were predictably skeptical of the need for any change to U.S. policy, arguing that as unsavory as some of our Arab allies might be, the status quo served America's core interests—something that wasn't guaranteed if more populist governments took their place.