1,050 Quotes by Barack Obama

the weather had quickly turned cold and dark, an arctic wind stripping the trees bare of leaves, as if the unusually mild weather we had enjoyed on election night had been merely part of an elaborate set

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

...that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldn't be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaign - and by extension a democracy - proved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.

That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.

We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation.

Yes, We Can

Indeed, it's not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead, representatives choose their voters.

What I could not support was "a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics".