Quotes from Barack Obama

that archetype is a closed man.

People think it's all a game," she said. "They don't care that there are thousands of men with guns out there who believe every word that's being said.

casings, the last remnants of tactical nuclear

You have my authorization." And with those four words, spoken into a device that had probably also been used to order pizza, I initiated the first new military intervention of my presidency.

I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian.

That all began to change in February 2010, though, when a Greek sovereign debt crisis threatened to unravel the European Union—and sent me and my economic team scrambling to avert yet another round of global financial panic.

Bobby Kennedy: no era tanto lo que hacía sino lo que te hacía sentir. Que todo era posible.

You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want

That was politics in Springfield: a series of transactions mostly hidden from view, legislators weighing the competing pressures of various interests with the dispassion of bazaar merchants, all the while keeping a careful eye on the handful of ideological hot buttons—guns, abortion, taxes—that might generate heat from their base.

That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

At the time, few people had or felt the need for private health insurance. Most Americans paid their doctors visit by visit, but the field of medicine was quickly growing more sophisticated, and as more diagnostic tests and surgeries became available, the attendant costs began to rise, tying health more explicitly to wealth. Both the United Kingdom and Germany had addressed similar issues by instituting national health insurance systems, and other European nations would eventually follow suit.

there's a direct link between doing your work and having your wishes come true.

think people whose fathers aren't there—and whose mothers are feeling really bitter about their fathers' not being there—what they absorb is how terrible that guy was and you don't want to be like that guy. In

When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president…the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. President Obama, in conversation with Marilynne Robinson, in New York Review of Books

It makes me wonder now, with the benefit of hindsight, whether Michelle's was the more honest response to all the changes we were going through; whether in my seeming calm as crises piled up, my insistence that everything would work out in the end, I was really just protecting myself—and contributing to her loneliness.

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

the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations…is meaningless.

Because, you know, contrary to the song of a great American master, we're generally not born to run. Most of us are born to run a little bit and go back home.

Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man's certainty always threatened another's.

Ultimately it was rap that got my head in the right place, two songs especially: Jay-Z's "My 1st Song" and Eminem's "Lose Yourself.

Why can't I just eat my waffle? - Barack Obama

the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communists, I thought; it was true for all of us.

The Memo Master" is how some on the staff referred to Pete. In his hands, the lowly memorandum approached an art form, each one efficient and oddly inspiring.

What binds us together is greater than what drives us apart.