Quotes from Barack Obama

The name's Obama. Where do I belong?

Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried - it is not even past.

We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

Human beings are members of a whole In creation of one essence and soul.

Leadership isn't just legislation, that it's a matter of persuading people and giving them confidence, and bringing them together and setting a tone.

I held my mother's hand, making sure she was comfortable before she settled in to rest. Then I went back to the hotel room and cried.

Havel, as much as anyone, had given moral voice to the grassroots democracy movements that had brought the Soviet era to an end. Along with Nelson Mandela and a handful of other living statesmen, he'd also been a distant role model for me.

How many of us are tested in that way, asked to risk careers we've long dreamed of in the service of some greater good?

You're too important for me to take no as an answer

But as al-Qaeda had scattered and gone underground, metastasizing into a complex web of affiliates, operatives, sleeper cells, and sympathizers connected by the internet and burner phones, our national security agencies had been challenged to construct new forms of more targeted, nontraditional warfare—including operating an arsenal of lethal drones to take out al-Qaeda operatives within the territory of Pakistan.

Making Compassionate Decisions: The Role of Empathy in Decision Making READING TIME: 19 MINUTES "The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else's shoes and see the world through their eyes.

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