“This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.”
―
Barack Obama
“All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.”
―
Barack Obama
“Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future.”
―
Barack Obama
“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”
―
Barack Obama
“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
―
Barack Obama
“We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.”
―
Barack Obama
“You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.”
―
Barack Obama
“Cynicism is a choice, and hope is a better choice.”
―
Barack Obama
“People with disabilities deserve the chance to build a life for themselves in the communities where they choose to live.”
―
Barack Obama
“The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight - that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie - contained a good deal of truth.”
―
Barack Obama
“perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.”
―
Barack Obama
“Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.”
―
Barack Obama
“Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I’d become troubled by questions.”
―
Barack Obama
“This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.”
―
Barack Obama