Quotes from Barack Obama

I'd never once heard her dwell on the disappointments. Instead she seemed to find small pleasures everywhere.

I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.

As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment

The idea that our common humanity mattered more than our differences was stitched into my DNA.

My liberty depends on you being free, too.

What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around congress.

Through them, I discovered a community of faith—that it was okay to doubt, to question, and still reach for something beyond the here and now.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works

I'm also hard at work on plans for the Obama Library. And some have suggested that we put it in my birthplace, but I'd rather keep it in the United States. Did anybody not see that joke coming? Show of hands.

But know this America: we will meet them

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.