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"I think we should all hope for a Russia that is successful, where its people are employed and the economy is growing and they are having good relationships with their neighbors."
"I am a firm believer that you don't do anything significant by yourself. Again, maybe there are exceptions. There's the Picasso or the Mozart."
"The pyramids are one of those things that live up to the hype. They're elemental in ways that are hard to describe."
"The Russians sought to interfere with the election process - that the cyber hacking that took place by the Russians was part of that campaign, and that they had a clear preference in terms of outcomes."
"These kinds of tragedies [like shooting in Fort Lauderdale] have happened too often during the eight years that I've been president. The pain, the grief, the shock that they must be going through is enormous. I've asked me staff to reach out to the mayor down there and make sure that coordination between the state and local officials is what it should be. But I think we'll find out over the next 24 hours exactly how this happened and what motivated this individual."
"Now suddenly you got members of your [White House] team who were 23, 24. They've met their wives here, or their husbands here."
"You not only do you appreciate the sacrifices people have made and the hours they've kept and the soccer games they missed and the birthday parties, but I also had a lot of young people who came in here [to White House], and this probably, you know, echoes with you, in your own experience, you were young when you got here."
"As you might imagine, if you're a teenager having a couple of people with microphones and guns always following you around, that could grate on them. But you know, they've handled it with grace and I give Michelle [Obama] most of the credit for how well they've done, but I also just think they are graceful, good young, young women."
"[My kids] are, sweet, kind, funny, smart, respectful people, and they treat everybody with respect. That's not just the biases of a parent. We feel pretty good when we hear back from friends, cause they still have sleepovers and they go to other folks houses and when the parents say, oh you know, Malia, she's just so sweet, or Sasha helped to pick up the dishes."
"All I can say is [kids] have turned out to be terrific young women. We were concerned mostly about whether they'd develop an attitude, right?"
"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]."
"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."
"Oftentimes, misunderstandings and antagonism surfaces most strongly when economic times are tough. And that's not surprising. If everybody is working and feeling good and making money and buying a new house and a big screen TV, you're less worried about what other folks are doing."
"Undocumented workers can't report if they're not being paid overtime, or if their health and safety laws are being violated, of if they're not getting the minimum wage. And so a lot of times companies prefer to hire them in order to take advantage of them. We've got to crack down on those employers."
"I do have an obligation to make sure that I am following some of the rules. I can't simply ignore laws that are out there."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."