Barack Obama Quotes

825 Sourced Quotes

Most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or as political operatives--professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems.

Barack Obama
Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a ten percent chance on change.

Barack Obama
Throughout American history, there have been moments that call on us to meet the challenges of an uncertain world, and pay whatever price is required to secure our freedom.

Barack Obama
In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.

Barack Obama
I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

Barack Obama
If we truly believe in our public schools, then we have a moral responsibility to do better - to break the either-or mentality around school reform, and embrace a both-and mentality. Good schools will require both the structural reform and the resources necessary to prepare our kids for the future.

Barack Obama
Our faith in each other, our love for each other, our love for country, our common creed that cuts across whatever superficial differences there may be—that is our power. That's our strength. That's why a bomb can't beat us. That's why we don't hunker down. That's why we don't cower in fear. We carry on. We race. We strive. We build, and we work, and we love—and we raise our kids to do the same.

Barack Obama
We should never forget that God granted us the power to reason so that we would do His work here on Earth - so that we would use science to cure disease, and heal the sick, and save lives.

Barack Obama
The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend on its own.

Barack Obama
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

Barack Obama
I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago 's South Side.

Barack Obama
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Barack Obama
John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell - but he won't even go to the cave where he lives.

Barack Obama
Part of America's genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shores.

Barack Obama
After my election there was talk of a postracial America. And such a vision, however well intended, was never realistic.

Barack Obama
So, let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look over not only ourselves, but each other.

Barack Obama
The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.

Barack Obama
My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. 'You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!

Barack Obama
You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq.

Barack Obama
Now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.

Barack Obama
Pot had helped, and booze, maybe a little blow when you could afford it.

Barack Obama
You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate.

Barack Obama
How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don't always satisfy me.... And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modesdy encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.

Barack Obama
The civil rights movement wasn't just a fight against the oppressor; it was also a fight against the oppressor in each of us.

Barack Obama
Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.

Barack Obama
It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

Barack Obama
Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington -- it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston....This is your victory.

Barack Obama
America's possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it - so long as we seize it together.

Barack Obama
I reject discrimination against Muslim Americans - who are just as patriotic as we are.

Barack Obama
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old - is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

Barack Obama