Quote collection
3.1K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Did I recognize that there was anger or frustration in the American population? Of course I did. First of all, we had to fight back from the worst recession since the Great Depression, and I can guarantee you if your housing values have crashed and you've lost most of your pension and you've lost your job, you're going to be pretty angry."
"Sustaining the energy and focus involved in doing a good job I think starts to - starts to gets tougher the longer you do it."
"There is a reason why George Washington is always one of the top three presidents, and it's not because of his prowess as a military leader; it's not because of the incredible innovations in policy that he introduced. It's because he knew when it was time to go."
"We can't discount how scary and shaken not just the Turkish government is, but Turkish society is. Imagine if you had some rump group of military officials here in the United States who started flying off with F-16s or other artillery and were taking shots at government buildings, and people were killed and injured. People would be scared and rightfully so."
"We have to acknowledge the progress we made, but understand that we still have a long way to go. That things are better, but still not good enough."
"We can have reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respect the Second Amendment and people's traditions."
"I put forward a budget of what I called "middle-class economics" that continues to be fiscally prudent but makes necessary investments for us to continue the economic momentum and job growth."
"It's not a choice between our environment and our economy; it's a choice between prosperity and decline."
"To keep Nigeria ONE, is a task that must be DONE."
"We've got to stop the name-calling and we've got to stop looking at the next election. We've got to be focused on figuring out what we're doing for the next generation."
"Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market."
"Whatever success I have achieved, whatever positions of leadership I have held have depended less on Ivy League degrees or SAT scores or GPAs and have instead been due to that sense of connection and empathy, the special obligation I felt as a black man like you to help those who need it most, people who didn't have the opportunities that I had because there, but for the grace of God go I. I might have been in their shoes. I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family. And that motivates me."
"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help... Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business - you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
"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."
"My task over the last two years hasn't just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created."
"What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high, people who have jobs see their incomes go up, businesses make big profits. But they're learned to do more with less, and so they don't hire."
"And so our goal on health care is, if we can get, instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it's going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we've made huge progress. And by the way, that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That's why we did it."
"I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels."
"No one is pro-abortion."
"I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries."