Quotes About Challenges

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.

Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up.

Whenever I first reached them on the phone, they would often be suspicious or evasive, uncertain as to why this Muslim—or worse yet, this Irishman, O'Bama—wanted a few minutes of their time.

Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the subjects they're teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools.

tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

Le problème au milieu d'une telle panique financière et dans une économie capitaliste moderne, c'est qu'il était impossible de faire la distinction entre les bonnes et les mauvaises entreprises, ou de ne châtier que les irresponsables et les crapuleux. Que cela nous plaise ou non, nous étions tous dans le même bateau.

The fuss of being president, the pomp, the press, the physical constraints—all that I could have done without. The actual work, though? The work, I loved. Even when it didn't love me back.

The responsibility of tackling these problems didn't scare me. In fact, I relished the chance. But from everything I was learning, things were likely to get significantly worse before they got better.

El mundo es complicado, Bar. Por eso es interesante.»

My mother-in-law never complained about anything. Whenever I interacted with her, I'd remember that, no matter what kind of mess I was dealing with, no one had forced me to be the president and that I needed to just suck it up and do my job.

I hope you don't mind me asking, Your Majesty," I said, "but how do you keep up with twelve wives?" "Very badly," he said, shaking his head wearily. "One of them is always jealous of the others. It's more complicated than Middle East politics.

If you are living life to its fullest, you will fail.

observed that two weeks earlier, when the House Republicans and I had issued sharply contrasting budget proposals, with profound implications for the nation, the news had instead been dominated by talk of my birth certificate. I noted that America faced enormous challenges and big decisions; that we should expect serious debates and sometimes fierce disagreements, because that was how our democracy was supposed to work, and I was certain that we had it in us to shape a better future together.

What did have me worried by the end of the trip was less a particular issue than an overall impression: the sense that for a variety of reasons—some of our own making, some beyond our control—the hopeful tide of democratization, liberalization, and integration that had swept the globe after the end of the Cold War was beginning to recede. Older, darker forces were gathering strength, and the stresses brought about by a prolonged economic downturn were likely to make things worse.

remarks to the graduates that evening, I spoke about the American idea: what their accomplishment said about our individual determination to reach past the circumstances of our birth, as well as our collective capacity to overcome our differences to meet the challenges of our time.

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. —

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.

Clinton himself understood that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security challenges.

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.

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.

Having the son of a black African with a Muslim name and socialist ideas ensconced in the White House with the full force of the U.S. government under his command was precisely the thing they wanted to be defended against.

Il y a des moments dans un combat électoral, comme dans la vie, où tous les chemins possible qui s'ouvraient à vous se ferment soudain, à l'exception d'un seul ; des moments où le large éventail de probabilités qui semblait se déployer se réduit à une seule issue, inévitable.

The obstacles in our path are not blocking us-they are redirecting us. Their purpose is not to interfere with our happiness; it is to point us toward new routes to our happiness, new possibilities, new doorways.

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.