It's the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I'm always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands.
I don't regret the excitement, because I do think that it helped us accomplish as much as we did.
I want to make sure America has got the best education system in the world. And we're retaining our workers for the jobs of tomorrow.
If you want to right-size executive power relative to the other branches of government, the best way to do that is to have a healthy Congress in which the two parties are debating, disagreeing, but also occasionally working together to pass legislation.
You don't know how it would have turned out if [kids] would grown up in Chicago instead, and a more normal environment.
Even when you go up ramp, and you think about [Franklin D. Roosevelt] wheeling himself up, you know, got a little cigarette holder in his mouth, and it, that, that awe that you feel, that reverence that you feel for the place never entirely leaves.
All of these different strands in me - the black, the white, the African - all of that has contributed directly to my success because when I meet people, I see a piece of myself in them. And maybe they see a piece of themselves in me.
A political consultant, when we first started thinking about Senate race, said, "You can have one funny name. You can be 'Barack Smith.' Or you can be 'Joe Obama.' But 'Barack Obama' - that's not gonna work."
I think you need to have people around you who can remind you that, actually, what you just said makes no sense. Fortunately, I have my wife to do that continually.
There is not a black America and a white America; a Latino America, an Asian America. There is the United States of America.
We know hackers steal people's identities and infiltrate private e-mails. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.
Our enemies are also seeking the abilities to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems.
What I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I've come to understand is that regardless of your faith - and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers - regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.
My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. But if you look at the track record America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.
We cannot solve the problems of America if every time somebody somewhere says something stupid, that everybody gets up in arms and we forget about the war in Iraq or we forget about the economy.
I think the most important thing is to take the long view on things. We live in such a 24/7, Twitter-fed, constant news cycle, and everything's a crisis, everything is terrible, everything is doomsday, everything is - if it doesn't get solved tomorrow, your presidency is going off the rails.
My job is to keep my eye on the ball and to stay focused on what can we get done every single day to advance the vision and values that brought me here.
We agreed that our economic and financial teams will remain in close contact as we stay focused on ensuring economic growth and financial stability.
Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy. And what I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there's classified and then there's classified. There's stuff that is really top secret top secret, and there's stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom or, you know, going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open source.
Sometimes when these kinds of things happen, it can seem a little bit too much to bear. But what I want the people of Louisiana know is that you're not alone on this. Even after the TV cameras leave, the whole country is going to continue to support you and help you until we get folks back in their homes and lives are rebuilt.
If you're reading something from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist next to some guy in his underwear writing in his basement, or his mom's basement, on text, it looks like it's equally plausible.
Moral values includes the immorality of 45 million uninsured or the immorality of working people who are having trouble raising a family despite working full-time. That has to be part of the moral equation. And if we are able to frame things in that fashion, then I think we can be successful.
Thanksgiving reminds us that no matter our differences, we're still one people, part of something bigger than ourselves.
Our alliance with our NATO partners has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy for nearly 70 years, in good times and in bad and through presidents of both parties because the United States has a fundamental interest in Europe's stability and security.
Climate change is one of the issues I worry most about because its impacts are enormous. But they're gradual, they're not immediate.
