Barack Obama

"We have traveled the world together. We did a few singles, a few doubles together. I’ve offered advice that I thought was pretty sound, like don’t do stupid stuff.(LAUGHTER) And even when you complained about my long answers, I just want you to know that the only reason they were long was because you asked six-part questions.(LAUGHTER)But I have enjoyed working with all of you. That does not, of course, mean that I’ve enjoyed every story that you have filed, but that’s the point of this relationship. You’re not supposed to be (inaudible) fans, you’re supposed to be skeptics, you’re supposed to ask me tough questions. You’re not supposed to be complimentary, but you’re supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power and make sure that we are accountable to the people who sent us here, and you have done that. And you have done it for the most part in ways that I could appreciate for fairness, even if I didn’t always agree with your conclusions. And having you in this building has made this place work better. It keeps us honest, it makes us work harder. You have made us think about how we are doing what we do and whether or not we’re able to deliver on what’s been requested by our constituents."

"I spent a lot of time on my — in my farewell address talking about the state of our democracy. It goes without saying that essential to that is a free press. That is part of how this place, this country, this grand experiment of self-government has to work. It doesn’t work if we don’t have a well-informed citizenry, and you are the conduit through which they receive the information about what’s taking place in the halls of power. So America needs you and our democracy needs you. We need you to establish a baseline of facts and evidence that we can use as a starting point for the kind of reasoned and informed debates that ultimately lead to progress. And so my hope is is that you will continue with the same tenacity that you showed us, to do the hard work of getting to the bottom of stories and getting them right and to push those of us in power to be the best version of ourselves and to push this country to be the best version of itself."

"But you know, we — when we feel stress, when we feel pressure, when we’re just fed information that encourages some of our worst instincts, we tend to fall back into some of the old racial fears and racial divisions and racial stereotypes, and it’s very hard for us to break out of those and to listen and to think about people as people and to imagine being in that person’s shoes. And by the way, it’s no longer a black and white issue alone. You got Hispanic folks and you got Asian folks, this is not just the same old battles that — we’ve got this stew that’s bubbling up from people everywhere and we’re going to have to make sure that we in our own lives and our own families and work places do a better job of treating everybody with basic respect and understanding that not everybody starts off in the same situation and imaging what would it be like if you were born in an inner city and had no job prospects anywhere within a 20 mile radius or how does it feel being born in some rural county where there’s no job opportunities within in a 20 mile radius and seeing those two things as connected as opposed to separate. So, you know, we got work to do, but overall, I think on this front, the trend lines, ultimately, I think will be good."

"I think it was really interesting to see how Malia and Sasha reacted. They were disappointed. They paid attention to what their mom said during the campaign and believed it because it’s consistent with what we have tried to teach them in our household and what I’ve tried to model as a father with their mom and what we’ve asked them to expect from future boyfriends or spouses. But what we’ve also tried to teach them is resilience and we’ve tried to teach them hope and that the only thing that is the end of the world is the end of the world. And so, you get knocked down, you get up, brush yourself off and you get back to work."

"You know, I have said before, and I will say again, that when we started on this journey, we did so with an abiding faith in the American people and their ability, our ability, to join together and change the country in ways that would make life better for our kids and our grandkids."

"That change didn't happen from the top down, but it happened from the bottom up. It was met sometimes with skepticism and doubt. Some folks didn't think we could pull it off. There were those that felt that the institutions of power and privilege in this country were too deeply entrenched. And yet, all of you came together in small towns and big cities, a whole bunch of you really young, and you decided to believe and you knocked on doors and you made phone calls and you talked to your parents who didn't know how to pronounce Barack Obama. And you got to know each other. And you went into communities that maybe you had never even thought about visiting and met people that on the surface seemed completely different than you -- didn't look like you or talk like you or watch the same TV programs as you. And yet, once you started talking to them, it turned out that you had something in common. And it grew and it built. And people took notice. And throughout, it was infused with a sense of hope. As I said in 2004, it wasn't blind optimism that drove you to do all of this work. It wasn't naiveté. It wasn't willful ignorance to all the challenges that America faces. It was hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. You proved the power of hope."

"When words stop meaning anything, when truth doesn’t matter, when people can just lie with abandon, democracy can’t work."

"It was in service of this long walk towards freedom and justice and equal opportunity that Nelson Mandela devoted his life. At the outset, his struggle was particular to this place, to his homeland – a fight to end apartheid, a fight to ensure lasting political and social and economic equality for its disenfranchised non-white citizens. But through his sacrifice and unwavering leadership and, perhaps most of all, through his moral example, Mandela and the movement he led would come to signify something larger. He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world, their hopes for a better life, the possibility of a moral transformation in the conduct of human affairs. Madiba’s light shone so brightly, even from that narrow Robben Island cell, that in the late ‘70s he could inspire a young college student on the other side of the world to reexamine his own priorities, could make me consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the world towards justice. And when later, as a law student, I witnessed Madiba emerge from prison, just a few months, you’ll recall, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I felt the same wave of hope that washed through hearts all around the world. Do you remember that feeling? It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable. Each step he took, you felt this is the moment when the old structures of violence and repression and ancient hatreds that had so long stunted people’s lives and confined the human spirit – that all that was crumbling before our eyes. And then, as Madiba guided this nation through negotiation painstakingly, reconciliation, its first fair and free elections; as we all witnessed the grace and the generosity with which he embraced former enemies, the wisdom for him to step away from power once he felt his job was complete, we understood that – we understood it was not just the subjugated, the oppressed who were being freed from the shackles of the past. The subjugator was being offered a gift, being given a chance to see in a new way, being given a chance to participate in the work of building a better world."

"So, on Madiba’s 100th birthday, we now stand at a crossroads – a moment in time at which two very different visions of humanity’s future compete for the hearts and the minds of citizens around the world. Two different stories, two different narratives about who we are and who we should be. How should we respond? Should we see that wave of hope that we felt with Madiba’s release from prison, from the Berlin Wall coming down – should we see that hope that we had as naïve and misguided? Should we understand the last 25 years of global integration as nothing more than a detour from the previous inevitable cycle of history — where might makes right, and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions, and nations compete in a zero-sum game, constantly teetering on the edge of conflict until full-blown war breaks out? Is that what we think? Let me tell you what I believe. I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision. I believe in a vision shared by Gandhi and King and Abraham Lincoln. I believe in a vision of equality and justice and freedom and multi-racial democracy, built on the premise that all people are created equal, and they’re endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And I believe that a world governed by such principles is possible and that it can achieve more peace and more cooperation in pursuit of a common good. That’s what I believe. And I believe we have no choice but to move forward; that those of us who believe in democracy and civil rights and a common humanity have a better story to tell. And I believe this not just based on sentiment, I believe it based on hard evidence."

"The fact that the world’s most prosperous and successful societies, the ones with the highest living standards and the highest levels of satisfaction among their people, happen to be those which have most closely approximated the liberal, progressive ideal that we talk about and have nurtured the talents and contributions of all their citizens. The fact that authoritarian governments have been shown time and time again to breed corruption, because they’re not accountable; to repress their people; to lose touch eventually with reality; to engage in bigger and bigger lies that ultimately result in economic and political and cultural and scientific stagnation. Look at history. Look at the facts. The fact that countries which rely on rabid nationalism and xenophobia and doctrines of tribal, racial, or religious superiority as their main organizing principle, the thing that holds people together – eventually those countries find themselves consumed by civil war or external war. Check the history books. The fact that technology cannot be put back in a bottle, so we’re stuck with the fact that we now live close together and populations are going to be moving, and environmental challenges are not going to go away on their own, so that the only way to effectively address problems like climate change or mass migration or pandemic disease will be to develop systems for more international cooperation, not less."

"Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time. And in a healthy democracy it doesn’t work. Our antibodies kick in, and people of goodwill from across the political spectrum callout the bigots and the fearmongers, and work to compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature."

"But when there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we don’t vote, when we take our basic rights and freedoms for granted, when we turn away and stop paying attention and stop engaging and stop believing and look for the newest diversion, the electronic versions of bread and circuses, then other voices fill the void. A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold. And demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. They promise to fight for the little guy even as they cater to the wealthiest and the most powerful. They promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability, try to change the rules to entrench their power further. And they appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all."

"And we won’t win people over by calling them names, or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist, or sexist, or homophobic. When I say bring people together, I mean all of our people. You know, this whole notion that has sprung up recently about Democrats need to choose between trying to appeal to the white working class voters, or voters of color, and women and LGBT Americans, that’s nonsense. I don’t buy that. I got votes from every demographic. We won by reaching out to everybody and competing everywhere and by fighting for every vote. And that’s what we’ve got to do in this election and every election after that."

"One election will not fix everything that needs to be fixed, but it will be a start. And you have to start it. What’s going to fix our democracy is you. People ask me, what are you going to do for the election? No, the question is: what are you going to do? You’re the antidote. Your participation and your spirit and your determination, not just in this election but in every subsequent election, and in the days between elections."

"Some of you may be aware our gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon any time — without much if any regulation, they can buy it over the Internet, they can buy machine gun."

"Democracy is a garden that has to be tended."

"Considering his enormous impact on the history of this country, what always struck those who met John was his gentleness and humility. Born into modest means in the heart of the Jim Crow South, he understood that he was just one of a long line of heroes in the struggle for racial justice. Early on, he embraced the principles of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience as the means to bring about real change in this country, understanding that such tactics had the power not only to change laws, but to change hearts and minds as well."

"We won’t have a president that threatens people with jail for just criticizing him"

"Short, owlish, with a smooth Kentucky accent, McConnell seemed an unlikely Republican leader. He showed no aptitude for schmoozing, backslapping, or rousing oratory. As far as anyone could tell, he had no close friends even in his own caucus, nor did he appear to have any strong convictions beyond an almost religious opposition to any version of campaign finance reform. Joe told me of one run-in he'd had on the Senate floor after the Republican leader blocked a bill Joe was sponsoring; when Joe tried to explain the bill's merits, McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, "You must be under the mistaken impression that I care." But what McConnell lacked in charisma or interest in policy he more than made up for in discipline, shrewdness, and shamelessness- all of which he employed in the single-minded and dispassionate pursuit of power."

"As we grieve the children of Uvalde today, we should take time to recognize that two years have passed since the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer. His killing stays with us all to this day, especially those who loved him."

"I will admit it is impossible to be dispassionate in the face of this carnage. It is hard to feel hopeful. The images of families mourning, of bodies being pulled from rubble force a moral reckoning on all of us. The ensuing debate has roiled college campuses, divided friends and allies, laid bare generational divides, and set off a surge of antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment. Even here, within our Obama Foundation family, we’ve had to sort through our anguish, our outrage, our fears, and our differences on the issues. Not so much differences in the outcome we wish for. I had a conversation with a group of you around this issue, and you were passionate and pushed me around some of the public statements I had made. The issue is not a wish for different outcomes, an end to the killing, peaceful coexistence between two sovereign and free peoples, but rather different assessments of the path that we need to take in order to get there, and the roles each of us have to play in order to maximize the chances of what seems impossible right now. And yet, as heartbreaking as the news is right now — and it is heartbreaking — as daunting as all the challenges that we face may be, I stand here convinced that it is within our power, or more specifically within your power to make this world better. That’s what this Democracy Forum is all about. It’s an affirmation of our shared, unyielding belief that war and racial division and religious conflict and poverty and hunger and catastrophic climate change are not inevitable."

"We’re here because we believe that humanity can bridge our differences and make better choices, that we can see each other and listen to each other, and imagine each other’s hardships and pain, and that this better future is most likely to happen under democratic systems of government, democracies in which everyone’s dignity is recognized, where the rule of law and human rights are respected by everybody, where people have a voice in how they’re governed, where we all have a stake in maintaining the social order, and where we can disagree with each other, sometimes bitterly, without losing sight of the ties that bind us together. That’s why we’re here. That’s the work you’re doing. And if we’re right, that a renewed commitment to democracy is a key ingredient to solving all our other big challenges. And we have so much more work to do. Because right now, we’re up against a set of economic and technological and cultural trends that are sweeping across the globe, and they’re weakening people’s commitment to democratic values. And they are promoting violence, and domination. And they’re making us blind to each other. And they’re making us cynical about our capacity to work together and govern ourselves."

"I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela."

"I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."

"Unlike some people, I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth."

"If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. If you've got a business, you didn't build that, somebody else made that happen."

"For all President Trump's talk these days about Democrats trying to make America socialist, the reality is that he is the king of big government. The federal bureaucracy is just as large, centralized, careless with spending, and intrusive under Donald Trump as it was when Barack Obama was in office. In many cases, it's bigger. This is an uncomfortable truth for Trump supporters. Rather than hew to traditional conservative beliefs about a limited federal role, Trump has allowed government to balloon. He's especially vexed when we inform him the government will never be large enough or powerful enough to execute his spontaneous propositions. The US federal budget deficit was actually declining under the Obama administration, from $1.4 trillion in 2009 when Obama took office to $587 billion in 2016, just before he left. Credit for the remarkable downward trend goes to congressional Republicans, who forced a standoff with the White House in 2011. They demanded a budget deal that would bring the deficit under control. This was the Budget Control Act, a law that slashed federal spending, put strict annual limits on future expenditures, and placed a cap on the government's "credit card." It was considered the conservative "Tea Party" movement's crowning achievement."

"Not a single day goes by that President Trump's outrageous statements don't confound someone on his team, if not all of us. I know other administrations dealt with this every once in a while. Obama's cabinet officials complained quietly that their boss would talk an issue to death and couldn't make up his mind. Bush aides winced at the president's foot-in-mouth moments. However, I also know that none of them had to deal with these frustrations on a daily basis."

"Tunisian history did not begin in December 2010. And did not set himself on fire so Barack Obama could be re-elected. His death was an emblem of the despair he had to endure under the Ben Ali regime. The world knew after reading publications that Ben Ali and his government had long enjoyed the indifference, if not the support, of the United States in full knowledge of its excesses and its crimes."

"He’s gentle towards the Muslims generally. Obama uses the word “terrorism” far less than his predecessor George W. Bush, and his name is a variant of the Arabic word ."

"I would say [..] he's probably the smartest guy ever to become president."

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

"Obama blames economic woes, some real some manufactured (“inequality”) on a philosophy and policy that was abandoned a century ago. What doesn’t exist is what he says didn’t work. Obama absurdly suggests that timid, half-hearted, compromisers, like George W. Bush, installed laissez-faire capitalism–on the grounds that they tinkered with one or two regulations (Glass-Steagall) and marginal tax rates–while blanking out the fact that under the Bush administration, government spending ballooned, growing much faster than under Clinton, and 50,000 new regulations were added to the Federal Register."

"Did NATO have problems? Of course. Not for nothing was Henry Kissinger's famous 1965 work entitled The Troubled Partnership: A Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance. The list of NATO's deficiencies was long, including, after the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse, the feckless abandonment by several European members of their responsibility to provide for their own self-defense. Under President Clinton, America suffered its own military declines, as he and others saw the collapse of Communism as "the end of history," slashing defense budgets to spend on politically beneficial domestic welfare programs. This "peace dividend" illusion never ended in much of Europe, but it ended in America with the September 11 mass murders in New York and Washington by Islamicist terrorists. NATO's future has been intensely debated among national-security experts for decades, with many urging a broader post-Cold War agenda. Barack Obama criticized NATO members for being "free riders," not spending adequately on their own defense budgets, but, typically, he had simply graced the world with his views, doing nothing to see them carried out."

"In 2008, many of Barack Obama’s supporters thought they might be electing another John F. Kennedy. But his recent maneuvers increasingly suggest that they selected another Dwight Eisenhower. That’s not a comment on President Obama’s effectiveness or ideology, but rather on his conception of presidential leadership. Whether he is confronting the turmoil reshaping the Middle East or the escalating budget wars in Washington, Obama most often uses a common set of strategies to pursue his goals. Those strategies have less in common with Kennedy’s inspirational, public-oriented leadership than with the muted, indirect, and targeted Eisenhower model that political scientist Fred Greenstein memorably described as a “hidden hand” presidency. This approach has allowed Obama to achieve many of his domestic and international aims — from passing the health reform legislation that marked its stormy first anniversary this week to encouraging Egypt’s peaceful transfer of power. But, like it did for Eisenhower, this style has exposed Obama to charges of passivity, indecisiveness, and leading from behind. The pattern has left even some of his supporters uncertain whether he is shrewd — or timid."

"President Obama is no JFK. He lacks the decisiveness, the ability to command, the knowledge of the world, the understanding of the moment, and the sense of history that was at the core of JFK’s presidency."

"When we heard that the president was going to be speaking, we knew we needed to make our presence known. If ever there was a moment in our lifetimes when it should truly matter that we had a Black president, now was that time, we felt. But President Barack Obama had not shown up for us. Why hadn't he come to Ferguson to be on the ground with us? He hadn't acknowledged Frontline's leadership. He'd had a meeting at the White House in December 2014 with activists from our movement, but not one person from Frontline had been invited. Why hadn't he opened the door to all of us? Here in Selma, we had the opportunity to make it known that President Obama had not met the moment. I expected him to show up for us, to come to what we called "ground zero" so that we could tell him what was really happening. I believed if he set foot onto West Florissant Avenue in the early days of our protests, or onto South Florissant Road, where the protests had moved to, the aggressive and violent treatment of protesters would cease. Maybe he could ease some of the burden that Michael Brown Jr.'s family carried as they were villainized while working to seek accountability for his death. He was a Black president, and regular, everyday Black people needed him just to show up. Presence can speak volumes."

"President Obama's got plenty of critics, and I'm not going to be one."

"I can't think of a time when I felt it was more important for us to defeat an incumbent president today with respect to Barack Obama. I think he has been an unmitigated disaster to the country."

"A gift for reading from a teleprompter is not the same as leadership."

"I know when you look at Washington right now, you shake your head at a president who can’t figure out how to lead, at a Congress that only 11 percent of the people in the last poll I saw approve of the job they’re doing. That’s what happens when you have someone in the executive office who is more concerned about being right than he is concerned about getting things done"

"The nonsense about President Obama being a Muslim has got to stop. I rise to defend him from this absurd accusation by pointing out that he is obviously an atheist."

"In many ways, she (Fannie Lou Hamer) paved the way for Barack Obama."

"(What do you think of the nation's first Black president?) There are moments of enormous possibility, and the election was such a moment. People all over the world felt as if we were moving toward a new world. However brief that sense of euphoria was, we should not forget that. That allows us to understand what possibilities might reside in the future. [But] many people tended to deposit so many aspirations in this single individual that they failed-we failed-to do the work [to take] better advantage of that moment. People went to the polls and said, "We've done our job," and left it up to Obama."

"Like many people, I'm sure Obama is an atheist"

"I am excited. Of course, I'm endorsing Senator Obama. He has made that decision and I think this is an exciting time for the country. It brings a new voice in regards to what is taking place far too long in Washington D.C., the lack of moving the agenda forward in regard to the quality of life for the people of America."

"Lincoln had an ally then of a kind that Obama could use now. Lincoln's old rival from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, whose party had been split by the fire-eaters and whom Lincoln defeated at the polls, became a wise and vital friend. In the months between the inauguration and Douglas’s early death in June 1861, the “little giant,” as he was known, spent many long hours talking to Lincoln about how best to preserve the Union—and compromise wasn’t part of the picture. … “You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as I do,” he told Lincoln. What both of those great politicians understood by then was that there may be better angels in the nature of some people, but there are others who are willing to weaken, even destroy a nation to serve their own self-righteous self-interest, and they will do it in the name of the Constitution. If Obama hasn’t learned that yet, perhaps it’s time he did."

"Our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost."

"Here's the formula for Obama's success: "They work, and you eat.""

"Now, those who were killed and injured here were gunned down by a single killer with a powerful assault weapon. The motives of this killer may have been different than the mass shooters in Aurora or Newtown. But the instruments of death were so similar. And now another 49 innocent people are dead; another 53 are injured; some are still fighting for their lives; some will have wounds that will last a lifetime. We can’t anticipate or catch every single deranged person that may wish to do harm to his neighbors or his friends or his coworkers or strangers. But we can do something about the amount of damage that they do. Unfortunately, our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist or just a disturbed individual like those in Aurora and Newtown to buy extraordinarily powerful weapons, and they can do so legally."