I get letters from [people getting insurance] right now. "You saved my child's life." "I did not have to sell my home when my wife got sick." And that is what, as a policy maker, I'm trying to achieve during the short period of time that I'm here.
Sometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program, it's not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit.
My hope would be that, as we're moving through the world right now, we're able to get that psychological or emotional peace by seeing very concretely our kids doing better and being more hopeful and having greater opportunities.
There is a certain percentage of the white population ... if they started having more middle-class black kids who are friends with their kids, eating Cheerios in their kitchen, their attitudes start changing.
I don't want to exaggerate; having as many African American men as we've had in the criminal-justice system, and the amount of time it takes for the damage done by that to wash through our society and our communities, the disadvantages born out of kids being undiagnosed with mental-health problems early, or not getting the kind of exposure to reading and math when they're 4 or 5 or 6 years old, that carries a cost.
You don't take it personally. You understand that if people are angry that somehow the government is failing, then they are going to look to the guy who represents government.
There have been times where, let's say on LGBT issues, when we were trying to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I got the Pentagon and Bob Gates, a Republican holdover from the [George W.] Bush administration, to authorize a study of how you might end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, headed up by Jeh Johnson, who at that time was a council to the Justice Department. And it was going to take a year to conduct that study, issue a report, and figure out how it might be implemented, what effect it would have on unit cohesion and military effectiveness.
Even if the criticism is not always perfectly informed and in some cases I would deem unfair, just the noise, attention, fuss probably keeps powerful officials or agencies on their toes. And they should be on their toes when it comes to the use of deadly force.
Rather take that moral sense and apply it to the particulars of a job that is going to test those ethical and moral precepts differently than if you're a professor, or a business person, or a dad. And if I were not comfortable with the judicious use of our military to protect the American people, than I shouldn't have run for president. And having said that, I do think that the wisdom of a [Martin Luther] King or a [Mahatma] Gandhi can inform my decisions.
I have to be able to implement a policy that doesn't completely erase borders and boundaries. Not because I think that Honduran child who's gotten here is less worthy of love, attention, opportunity than my child, but because I'm the president of the United States of America and I'm not speaking as a religious leader.
Part of American leadership is making sure that we're doing nation building here at home. That will help us maintain the kind of American leadership that we need.
Moammar Gadhafi had more American blood on his hands than any individual other than Osama bin Laden.
I will stand with Israel if they are attacked.
When I've sent young men and women into harm's way, I always understand that that is the last resort, not the first resort.
There's no reason why Americans should die when Afghans are perfectly capable of defending their own country.
If war explodes in Sudan, it could have a destabilizing effect that creates more space for terrorist activity that could eventually be directed at our homeland.
We've got to identify new strategies to use cleaner energy, because that is a recipe for reducing the overall amount of pollution that's out there.
The Internet and Twitter and all these things are very powerful, but it also means sometimes that instead of having a dialogue we just start calling folks - calling each other names. And that's true on the left or the right.
America is a nation of immigrants. And so the question is, how do we make legal immigration faster, less bureaucratic, cut the red tape?
African American boys oftentimes fall behind in school early, start feeling discouraged, check out, drop out, end up on the streets and then get into trouble.
Going through the legislative process is always better, in part because it's harder to undo.
In America, we're getting too comfortable with our ability to take kinetic strikes around the world without having enough process to avoid consistently the kinds of civilian casualties that can end up actually hurting us in the war against radicalization.
If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then, I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.
How we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn't lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology is a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.
I have never had to travel more than thirty seconds from home to office, and it's because of that that I've been able to maintain, really a family life that has nurtured and sustained me during this time [of presidency].
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