Barack Obama Quotes

Cutting our education budget, that's not a smart choice. That will not help America compete with China.

I think the American people can change Washington. But I think that it is not going to change, because somebody from on high directs that change.

I don't regret at all saying that if I saw Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons on his people that that would change my assessments in terms of what we were or were not willing to do in Syria.

I'm not going to Wall Street [after the presidency]. The amount of time that I'll be investing in issues is going to be high. But it'll be necessarily in a different capacity.

People'd be like, "Oh, spending taxpayer money." It's like, "No, no, I actually I'm paying for all of this. The only thing I don't pay for is Secret Service and an airplane."

Germany, South Korea - these are all countries that are investing massively in education. We've got to do the same thing in America.

What we may think is funny or cute may end up being powerfully hurtful.

I do have an obligation to make sure that I am following some of the rules. I can't simply ignore laws that are out there.

All I can say is [kids] have turned out to be terrific young women. We were concerned mostly about whether they'd develop an attitude, right?

Now suddenly you got members of your [White House] team who were 23, 24. They've met their wives here, or their husbands here.

[The Democrats] have got to do a better job of showing up.

I think we've done a pretty good job staying in touch with the American people. But at a certain point you can't help but lose some feel for what's on the ground because you're not on the ground.

What I've said to [my team] is, "Look, we ran our leg of the race and we did a darn good job."

The truth of the matter is that the problem of police shootings and reactions in the community.

There are some exceptions: Chicago, my hometown, in particular. But overall in the country this is a much safer place than it used to be.

If you ask the average person they'd tell ya, "Naw, it's much more dangerous," despite the fact that violent crime has dropped precipitously.

I think I will still feel that same appreciation for what [Winston] Churchill and others have said is the worst form of government except all the alternatives.

Shaykh Bin Bayyah described his purpose. We must declare war on war so the outcome will be peace upon peace.

It is absolutely important that we have a unified alliance and that we explain to the Russians that you cannot be a 21st-century superpower, or power, and act like a 20th-century dictatorship.

We have to be successful at the cutting-edge industries of the future like Twitter. But we also have always been a country that makes stuff.

I have been a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I've proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches.

If you're really concerned about deficits, you cannot take seriously a budget that would give $30 billion a year worth of tax cuts to not just the top 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent.

I don't expect to get 100 percent of what I want, but what we can't do is go back to the kind of top-down economics that doesn't work.

You might slow down a little bit, you might not jump as high as you used to, but I know what I'm doing and I'm fearless.

One thing you learn in this job [being US President] is that even if something's not your fault, you're still responsible. And that's how it should be.

Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.

The senators know it's important to win statewide to have Hispanics and other immigrant populations supporting them.

America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life's been blessed by both.

The reason we're governing right now is because we defeated moderate Republicans with moderate Democrats. And people need to be patient about that and realize that compromise is not evil.

In Missouri, it's a 50/50 state, so I'm kind of used to half the state being mad at me.

I'm measuring my actions against that inner voice that for me at least is audible, is active, it tells me where I think I'm on track and where I think I'm off track.

Nothing is more powerful than the black church experience. A good choir and a good sermon in the black church, it's pretty hard not to be move and be transported.

Their foreign policy is so disjointed, confusing, and chaotic that, really, people need to reexamine those who want to be involved in every war.

As president, I decided that a strong, confident America could advance our national security by engaging directly with the Iranian government. We've seen the results.

We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.

And there’s been drift in Afghanistan over the last couple of years. That’s something that we intend to fix this.

You know, the bowling alley doesn‘t seem to be improving my game. That‘s the one thing I have noticed.

You know, I think that we are going to be OK. Look, Malia is 10, so three years from now she is 13. Who knows what happens to teenagers?

A lot of the issues that I see, it is not an either-or situation.

Rather, my perceptions about how we solve problems in health care or education span across a whole range of areas. And I want to try to capture that complexity.

I think that today, faith drives so much of our politics, that I thought, "If you don't talk about it, you are missing a whole big part of what is going on politically."

Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy.

When it comes to crime, the violent crime rate in America has been lowered during my presidency and any time in the last three, four decades.

America is much less violent than it was 20, 30 years ago, and immigration is much less a problem than it was not just 20, 30 years ago, but when I came in as president.

Companies in Mexico are not going to do well if they don't have some connection to not just markets, but also suppliers and technology from the United States.

Of course I have got concerns. Donald Trump and I differ on a whole bunch of issues.

Better may not be as good as the best, but better is surprisingly hard to obtain. And better is actually harder than worse.

A political candidacy built around hope and change and compromise would eventually become a presidency of crisis and confrontation.

We [USA] don't have diplomatic leverage to eliminate every vestige of a peaceful nuclear program in Iran. What we do have the leverage to do is to make sure that they don't have a weapon.

If Mr. [Donald] Trump is up 10 or 15 points on Election Day and ends up losing, then, you know, maybe he can raise some questions. That doesn't seem to be the case at that moment.