"Effective immediately, we will only pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of three."
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Quote collection
Barack Obama quotes (page 50 of 157)
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"The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11 ... The program does not involve the NSA examining the phone records of ordinary Americans. Rather, it consolidates these records into a database that the government can query if it has a specific lead - phone records that the companies already retain for business purposes."
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"Those who are troubled by our existing programs are not interested in a repeat of 9/11, and those who defend these programs are not dismissive of civil liberties. The challenge is getting the details right, and that's not simple."
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"A number of countries, including some who have loudly criticized the NSA, privately acknowledge that America has special responsibilities as the world's only superpower, that our intelligence capabilities are critical to meeting these responsibilities, and that they themselves have relied on the information we obtain to protect their own people."
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"The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it."
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"It's true that I have not been able to completely close Guantanamo, but we've drastically reduced the population from 700 or so to around 60 now."
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"Let's say I'm on the policy wonk end of the spectrum. As much as I can dive into a briefing book and really work to master various subjects that come before my desk, I'm still not an expert on a huge amount of the stuff that we work on."
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"I invigorated the grassroots in the Republican Party as well as the Democratic Party."
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"Our unalienable right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, those rights were stripped from college kids in Blackburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine. And, and from first graders in Newtown, first graders."
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"I believe we [americans] are strongest as a nation, when the president and Congress work together."
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"This is a core principle of my presidency - if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven."
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"If you think you got a better idea in terms of how to approach this that's not gonna result in more pollution, and more asthma, and more illness then put your ideas out there. But don't just oppose things because, "This was Obama's agenda.""
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"There have been times where, let's say on LGBT issues, when we were trying to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I got the Pentagon and Bob Gates, a Republican holdover from the [George W.] Bush administration, to authorize a study of how you might end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, headed up by Jeh Johnson, who at that time was a council to the Justice Department. And it was going to take a year to conduct that study, issue a report, and figure out how it might be implemented, what effect it would have on unit cohesion and military effectiveness."
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"Our job as Americans is to restore that basic bargain that says, if you work hard, if you're willing to meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead. You can get ahead. Doesn't matter what you look like, doesn't matter where you come from. Our middle class, when it's growing, when it's thriving, when there are ladders of opportunity for people to do a little bit better each year and then make sure that their kids are doing even better than them, that's the American dream. That's what we got to fight for. That has to be the north star that guides everything we do."
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"If you're reading something from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist next to some guy in his underwear writing in his basement, or his mom's basement, on text, it looks like it's equally plausible."
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"I think the most important thing is to take the long view on things. We live in such a 24/7, Twitter-fed, constant news cycle, and everything's a crisis, everything is terrible, everything is doomsday, everything is - if it doesn't get solved tomorrow, your presidency is going off the rails."
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"I think that there is a particular mindset that was on display in the run-up to the Iraq war that continues to this day. Some of the folks who were involved in that decision either don't remember what they said or are entirely unapologetic about the results, but that views the Middle East as a place where force and intimidation will deliver on the security interests that we have, and that it is not possible for us to at least test the possibility of diplomacy."
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"We reward people a lot for being rich, for being famous, for being cute, for being thin... one of the values I think we need to instill in our country, in our children, is a sense of 'usefulness', in other words, are we useful, are we making other peoples' lives a little bit better?"
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"Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside. Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect."
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"Politics, differences of religion or race, all that fades away when we are confronted with the awesome power of nature, and we're reminded that all we have is each other."
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