Barack Obama Quotes

It would be naive of me to suggest that with Russia committed militarily, as it is, to supporting what in many cases are barbarous tactics by the Assad regime to crush the opposition.

The Iranian people are getting restive because of the challenges that sanctions have posed to their economy.

It's good to get fresh legs in [the White house]. I think that it refreshes our democracy.

My guiding principle as president has been to try to do the right thing even when it's not politically convenient.

It's easier to make negative attacks and simplistic slogans [in social media] than it is to communicate complex policies.

In the United States, if 43 percent of eligible voters do not vote, then democracy is weakened.

Here in Europe, I think that there are a lot of young people who forget the issues that were at stake during the Cold War.

I believe in term limits for presidents because I think that there is no doubt I'm a better president now than I was when I start.

Insurance companies, drug companies are going to have to be ponying up, partly because right now they're receiving huge subsidies.

I always tell young people in particular: Do not say that nothing's changed when it comes to race in America, unless you lived through being a black man in the 1950s or '60s or '70s.

The United States wants a strong United Kingdom as a partner. And the United Kingdom is at its best when it's helping to lead a strong Europe.

I absolutely think that when we talk about family, faith, community, I think it's important for Democrats to be able to connect with folks where they live.

I absolutely think that it's possible for us to find common ground.

When your team loses, everybody gets deflated. And it's hard, and it's challenging.

If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote.

I continue to believe when I said in Hanover, that the E.U. remains one of the world's great political and economic achievements, and that those achievements should not be taken for granted.

I think we would have made a lot more mistakes and would have accomplished a lot less had we not been grounded in some basic truths.

The first thing I would do would be to move forward with an agenda to make sure that we give D.C. the opportunity to elect its own representatives and have some political power on Capitol Hill.

If I were German and I had a vote, I might support Angela Merkel.

[Young people] are showing enormous and entrepreneurship and working with each other across borders.

I have got to figure out a system because I have bad filing, sorting, and organizing habits.

Certainly I've appreciated Angela Merkel as a partner.

I try to make it a rule not to meddle in other people's politics.

If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won't know what to protect. We won't know what to fight for.

I know that gaps can be closed. And they can be closed substantially, more than I think we believe.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Yes We Can!

Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.

What's missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.

We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost.

it’s important to make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.

I've got daughters. Nine years old and six years old. First of all, I'm gonna teach them about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them PUNISHED with a baby.

Over the last fifteen months we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been to fifty-seven states. I think, one left to go.

There's no such thing as a vote that doesn't matter.

Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.

None of These Will Come Easy.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

More than anything, it is that sense - that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together - that we can't afford to lose.

Like any value, empathy must be acted upon.

Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.

The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

I'm an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.

America is big enough to accommodate all their dreams.

Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.

A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.

Our values call upon us to care about people we'll never meet.

Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it's bred indifference.

Our values call upon us to care about the lives of people we will never meet.

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.