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"I've said repeatedly that where we see terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIL, they have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse, for basically barbarism and death. These are people who kill children, kill Muslims, take sex slaves - there's no religious rationale that would justify in any way any of the things that they do."
"There are institutional obligations I have to carry out that are important for a president of the United States to carry out, but may not always align with what I think would move the ball down the field on the issues that I care most deeply about."
"There wasn't a time where I felt fearful that I couldn't make the best decisions possible."
"Anybody who gets into bed and turns out the lights the first night in the White House probably feels a little bit of a start, where you say, "Goodness ... ""
"There aren't a lot of situations where I look back and I say, The decision I actually made or the course we actually pursued was the wrong course."
"I know there are problems that I say to myself, If maybe I was a little more gifted I might have been able to solve. But that's not because I believe what I did was a mistake. It's that maybe it required the talents of a Lincoln."
"I think I have a pretty good take on popular culture that maybe makes up for the fact that I'm not a sound-bite politician for the nightly news."
"I think part of the reason that I have been successful, though, despite maybe not always fitting my message into the pre-packaged formulas, is there is this whole other media ecology out there of the Internet and Instagram and memes and talk shows and comedy, and I'm pretty good at that."
"There is a big part of me that has a writer's sensibility. And so that's how I think. That's how I pursue truth. That's how I hope to communicate truth to people."
"Generally speaking, people who know me will tell you that my public persona is not that different from my private persona."
"The Balkanization of the media means that nobody is having a single conversation with a single set of agreed-upon facts and assumptions the way you had as recently as the 90s."
"There are some exceptions: Chicago, my hometown, in particular. But overall in the country this is a much safer place than it used to be."
"Moammar Gadhafi had more American blood on his hands than any individual other than Osama bin Laden."
"Part of American leadership is making sure that we're doing nation building here at home. That will help us maintain the kind of American leadership that we need."
"My first job as commander in chief is to keep the American people safe."
"Even if the criticism is not always perfectly informed and in some cases I would deem unfair, just the noise, attention, fuss probably keeps powerful officials or agencies on their toes. And they should be on their toes when it comes to the use of deadly force."
"I think where I get frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it."
"You don't take it personally. You understand that if people are angry that somehow the government is failing, then they are going to look to the guy who represents government."
"Does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap [between Afro-Americans and white] would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we've had before when you talk about something like reparations."
"The same would be true for something like Social Security, where historically, if you just read the law and the fact that it excluded domestic workers or agricultural workers, you might not see race in it, unless you knew that that covered a huge chunk of African Americans, particularly in the South."