I took to circling unfamiliar words to look up in the dictionary, although I was less scrupulous about decoding pronunciations – deep into my twenties I would know the meaning of words I couldn’t pronounce. There was no system to this, no rhyme or pattern. I was like a young tinkerer in my parents’ garage, gathering up old cathode-ray tubes and bolts and loose wires, not sure what I’d do with any of it, but convinced it would prove handy once I figured out the nature of my calling.

— Barack Obama

Barack Obama Quotes

As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless;.

— Barack Obama

Unlike most academics, Warren showed a gift for translating financial analysis into stories that ordinary folks could understand. In the intervening years, she had emerged as one of the financial industry’s most effective critics, prompting Harry Reid to appoint her as chair of the congressional panel overseeing TARP.

— Barack Obama

We were expecting maybe a hundred people at the park,” Jeremiah said, “but right now they’re counting at least five hundred. They asked us to slow down so they have time to deal with the overflow.

— Barack Obama

If we want other countries to support our priorities,” I told my NSC team, “we can’t just bully them into it. We’ve got to show them we’re taking their perspectives into account – or at least can find them on a map.

— Barack Obama

The day was cold, the wind cutting, the sun a dim watermark on the gray sky.

— Barack Obama

Wanting to be in politics but not of it.

— Barack Obama

The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them – those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making.

— Barack Obama

Sometimes you were just screwed, and the best you could do was have a stiff drink – and light up a cigarette.

— Barack Obama

My head was crammed with too many facts and too few answers.

— Barack Obama

I’d put forward what I considered to be clear positions on all these issues during the campaign. But that had been from the cheap seats, before I had hundreds of thousands of troops and a sprawling national security infrastructure under my command. Any terrorist attack would now happen on my watch. Any American lives lost or compromised, at home or abroad, would weigh uniquely on my conscience. These were my wars now.

— Barack Obama

If I had a spare minute, the thank-you notes I wrote and the birthday calls I made would be directed not to them but to our volunteers and young staff out in the field.

— Barack Obama

There’s only one thing you can count on, Mr. President,” he said. “On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up.

— Barack Obama

As a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit.

— Barack Obama

And there was the time Paul McCartney serenaded my wife with “Michelle.” She laughed, a little embarrassed, as the rest of the audience applauded, and I wondered what Michelle’s parents would have said back in 1965, the year the song came out, if someone had knocked on the door of their South Side home and told them that someday the Beatle who wrote it would be singing it to their daughter from a White House stage.

— Barack Obama

It was the America of Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, making dreams take flight, and Jackie Robinson stealing home. It was Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday at the Village Vanguard and Johnny Cash at Folsom State Prison – all those misfits who took the scraps that others overlooked or discarded and made beauty no one had seen before.

— Barack Obama

I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America – not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.

— Barack Obama

Part of the argument I made to Michelle before running for president was that if I pulled it off, kids all over the world would see themselves and their possibilities differently. And that alone would be worth it.

— Barack Obama

Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama!” Keyes would proclaim, deliberately mispronouncing my name every time. I beat him by more than forty points – the biggest margin for a Senate race in the state’s history.

— Barack Obama

I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web.

— Barack Obama

I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people – and this is accelerated by social media – there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.’” He added: “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.

— Barack Obama
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