My administration will be the most transparent in history

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

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

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

Courage?" I gave a very soft laugh. "I find courage is just another of life's illusions. In the end, we all do what we must.

Shine your light on love and truth and your soul will glow.

An orator is a good man who is skilled in speaking.

My favorite parts of work as an actor and a director are those unplanned mistakes that do happen, because it's like catching lightning in a bottle. It's the best part of what we do.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history.

Almost everything in leadership comes back to relationships.

Finland, and all the other European countries, we are too dependent on imported energy. We should be using a broader variety of energy resources.

I don't try to focus on anything that doesn't affect me personally and how I go out there every single day. I'm just going to continue to work hard and focus on what I can control.