Quotes from Barack Obama

We will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.

A change happens because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless.

A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together, but for most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, argument, and persuasion which allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices — not only about the means to our ends, but also the ends themselves.

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.

And you won't have to wake up at four in the morning," she said, a point that I found most compelling.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.

We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.

I don't think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.

I couldn't rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall.

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.