Quotes from Barack Obama

You've been cursed with people's high expectations, he said, shaking my hand. Because it means they are also easily disappointed. It's something I'm familiar with. I fear it can be a trap. p351

he assumed that the world had surely learned once and for all that hatred was useless and racism stupid and "the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations…is meaningless.

the broader question of shared values—the standards and principles that the majority of Americans deem important in their lives, and in the life of the country—should be the heart of our politics

These efforts bore fruit during LBJ's Great Society campaign, when a universal single-payer program partially funded by payroll tax revenue was introduced for seniors (Medicare) and a not-so-comprehensive program based on a combination of federal and state funding was set up for the poor (Medicaid).

He ticked off the "four factions" he believed were behind the protests: the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and Hamas. Neither of these leaders' analyses stood up to scrutiny.

I think we're people that needed boundaries.

would have sympathized more had I not known that high-ranking Communist Party officials—including Wen—had a habit of steering state contracts and licenses to family members and siphoning billions into offshore accounts.

Il n'y a aucune raison que la politique soit nécessairement conforme à l'image que s'en font les gens. Ca peut être autre chose.

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. Even governments that rely on our military and economic assistance think first and foremost of their own survival, and the Mubarak regime was no exception. After

Rarely do your efforts bear fruit right away; the scale of most problems coming across your desk is too big for that, the factors at play too varied.

In their view, we'd compromised too much, and by continually chasing the false promise of bipartisanship, we'd not only empowered McConnell and squandered big Democratic majorities; we'd thrown a giant wet blanket over our base—as evidenced by the decision of so many Democrats to not bother to vote in the midterms.

The audacity of hope.

Once, while our motorcade was barreling down the highway in a driving Iowa rainstorm, he leaned forward and yelled at the agent behind the wheel, "Son, I'm half blind but even I can see you're too damn close to that car!")

Ben informed me that those lines were written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa'adi, one of the most beloved figures in Iranian culture. We found this ironic, given how much of my time at UNGA was devoted to trying to curb Iran's development of nuclear weapons.

if you needed a woman, you were weak. Family was restrictive to your male freedoms.

I didn't feel that I deserved to be in the company of the transformative figures who'd been given the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, I saw the prize as a call to action.

In truth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also weighed on me personally. Some of the earliest moral instruction I got from my mother revolved around the Holocaust, an unconscionable catastrophe that, like slavery, she explained, was rooted in the inability or unwillingness to recognize the humanity of others.

Also, members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organization dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel. 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.

In other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn't have to.

I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant

evoked my own youthful idealism, the part of me still untouched by cynicism, cold calculation, or caution dressed up as wisdom.

As a matter of principle, I didn't believe a president should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters—it's what you signed up for in taking the job—and I was quick to remind both reporters and friends that my white predecessors had all endured their share of vicious personal attacks and obstructionism.

Katie printed out a wire photo and left it on my desk; it showed a group of young protesters in the Egyptian square hoisting a sign that read, YES WE CAN.

You ready for me, Wen?" I called out, watching the Chinese leader's face drop in surprise. I then walked around the table to shake each of their hands. "Gentlemen! I've been looking everywhere for you. How about we see if we can do a deal?" Before anybody could object, I grabbed an empty chair and sat down. Across the table, Wen and Singh remained impassive, while Lula and Zuma looked sheepishly down at the papers in front of them.