Quotes from Barack Obama

carrying all the same baggage. All the same anger, all the same pent-up frustrations, all the same messages.

Enthusiasm makes up for a host of deficiencies

Circumstances may have opened the door to a presidential race, but nothing during these months had prevented me from closing it. I could easily close the door still. And the fact that I hadn't, that instead I had allowed the door to open wider, was all Michelle needed to know. If one of the qualifications of running for the most powerful office in the world was megalomania, it appeared I was passing the test.

I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

The students and their parents had cheered, many of them waving American flags of their own. I thought about the country I'd just described to them—a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an America that was open to everyone. At about the same age as the graduates were now, I'd seized on that idea and clung to it for dear life. For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.

But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives.

Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.

The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person…

And yet, in the flickering of those candles, I saw something else. I saw an expression of the spirit of millions of people around the world:

common courtesy spoke across cultures

Je commençais à comprendre qui était réellement mon adversaire. Ce n'était pas contre Hillary Clinton ou contre John Edwards que je me battais, ni même contre les républicains. Je me battais contre le poids implacable du passé ; contre l'inertie, le fatalisme et la peur qu'il engendrait.

Within the U.S. military, members of Special Ops were considered a breed apart, an elite warrior class that carried out the most difficult missions under the most dangerous circumstances—the guys in the movies rappelling from helicopters into enemy territory or making amphibious landings under cover of darkness.

The change comes later. In about five years, although it seems like it's coming sooner all the time." "What change is that?" "When their eyes stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they've shut off something inside.

Every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or live up to his mistakes.

War might be hell and still the right thing to do. Economies could collapse despite the best-laid plans. People could work hard all their lives and still lose everything.

This idea of purity and you're never compromised, you're always politically woke and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities.

My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

What does he think I'm supposed to do?" I growled at Rahm after hearing of Carville's broadside. "Put on my fucking Aquaman gear and swim down there myself with a wrench?

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.

In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi's campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.

In other words," she said, "you've got some magic beans in your pocket. That's what you're telling me. You have some magic beans, and you're going to plant them, and overnight a huge beanstalk is going to grow high into the sky, and you'll climb up the beanstalk, kill the giant who lives in the clouds, and then bring home a goose that lays golden eggs. Is that it?

In this new world, a foreign policy victory by every traditional standard could be spun as a defeat, at least in the minds of half the country; messages that advanced our interests and built goodwill abroad could lead to a host of political headaches back home.

The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. . . . What I think we know — separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in their country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that's just a fact." — President Obama on Gates' arrest.

Still, there was no getting around the fact that many of the people most culpable for the nation's economic woes remained fabulously wealthy and had avoided prosecution mainly because the laws as written deemed epic recklessness and dishonesty in the boardroom or on the trading floor less blameworthy than the actions of a teenage shoplifter.