Barack Obama: Use

Barack Obama is 44th President of the United States of America. Explore interesting quotes on use.

Barack Obama: 2316 quotes1236 likes

“And throughout this process, Michelle and I, we just have been your frontmen and women. We have been the face, sometimes the voice, out front on the TV screen or in front of the microphone, but this has never been about us. It has always been about you. And all the amazing things that happened over these last 10 years are really just a testament to you. In the same way that when we talk about our amazing military and our men and women in uniform, the military is not a thing. It's a group of committed patriots willing to sacrifice everything on our behalf. It works only because of the people in it. As cool as the hardware is, and we have cool hardware, as cool as the machines and weapons and satellites are, ultimately it comes down to remarkable people.”

2017, Farewell to Staff Members (January 2017)

“I believe that none of us are fully free when others in the human family remain shackled by poverty or disease or oppression.”

2013, Cape Town University Address (June 2013)

“My administration has a job to do as well. That job is to get this economy back on its feet. That's my job, and it's a job I gladly accept. I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, "Well this is Obama's economy." That's fine. GIVE IT TO ME. My job is to solve problems, not to stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe. So, I welcome the job. I want the responsibility.”

President Obama, July 14, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CQBSTomBWls <br class="br">2009

“As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit. We don’t need to build them up to show that we’re serious, nor do we need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that ISIL is representative of one of the world’s largest religions. We just need to call them what they are — killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.”

2016, State of the Union address (January 2016)

“We would do a disservice to those warriors of justice -- Tubman, and Douglass, and Lincoln, and King -- were we to deny that the scars of our nation’s original sin are still with us today. We condemn ourselves to shackles once more if we fail to answer those who wonder if they’re truly equals in their communities, or in their justice systems, or in a job interview. We betray the efforts of the past if we fail to push back against bigotry in all its forms.”

2015, Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the 13th Amendment (December 2015)

“America has never come easy. Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble; we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than two hundred years, we have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress: to create and build and expand the possibilities of individual achievement; to free other nations from tyranny and fear; to promote justice and fairness and equality under the law, so that the words set to paper by our founders are made real for every citizen. The America we want for our kids -- a rising America where honest work is plentiful and communities are strong; where prosperity is widely shared and opportunity for all lets us go as far as our dreams and toil will take us -- none of it is easy. But if we work together; if we summon what is best in us […], with our feet planted firmly in today but our eyes cast towards tomorrow, I know it's within our reach. Believe it.”

2014, Sixth State of the Union Address (January 2014)

“Poland reminds us that sometimes the smallest steps, however imperfect, can ultimately tear down walls, can ultimately transform the world.”

2014, 25th Anniversary of Polish Freedom Day Speech (June 2014)

“I have been a consistent and strong opponent of this war. I have also tried to act responsibly in that opposition to ensure that, having made the decision to go into Iraq, we provide our troops, who perform valiantly, the support they need to complete their mission. I have also stated publicly that I think we have both strategic interests and humanitarian responsibilities in ensuring that Iraq is as stable as possible under the circumstances. Finally, I said publicly that it is my preference not to micromanage the Commander-in-Chief in the prosecution of war. Ultimately, I do not believe that is the ideal role for Congress to play. But at a certain point, we have to draw a line. At a certain point, the American people have to have some confidence that we are not simply going down this blind alley in perpetuity.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances, for waiting and patience is over. Too many lives have been lost and too many billions have been spent for us to trust the President on another tried-and-failed policy, opposed by generals and experts, opposed by Democrats and Republicans, opposed by Americans and even the Iraqis themselves. It is time to change our policy. It is time to give Iraqis their country back, and it is time to refocus America's effort on the wider struggle against terror yet to be won.”

Floor Statement on President's Decision to Increase Troops in Iraq (19 January 2007)
2007

“No, the reward comes in knowing that our entire way of life in America depends on the rule of law; that the maintenance of that law is a hard and daily labor; that in this country, we don’t have soldiers in the streets or militias setting the rules. Instead, we have public servants -- police officers -- like the men who were taken away from us.”

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)

“None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight. Every time something like this happens, somebody says we have to have a conversation about race. We talk a lot about race. There’s no shortcut. And we don’t need more talk. None of us should believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy. It will not. People of goodwill will continue to debate the merits of various policies, as our democracy requires -- this is a big, raucous place, America is. And there are good people on both sides of these debates. Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again. Once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual -- that’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society. To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change -- that’s how we lose our way again. It would be a refutation of the forgiveness expressed by those families if we merely slipped into old habits, whereby those who disagree with us are not merely wrong but bad; where we shout instead of listen; where we barricade ourselves behind preconceived notions or well-practiced cynicism.”

2015, Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney (June 2015)

“First and foremost, let us remember that change has never been quick. Change has never been simple, or without controversy. Change depends on persistence. Change requires determination.”

2011, Remarks at a Dedication Ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial (October 2011)

“That’s what we must pray for, each of us: a new heart. Not a heart of stone, but a heart open to the fears and hopes and challenges of our fellow citizens. […] Because with an open heart, we can learn to stand in each other’s shoes and look at the world through each other’s eyes, so that maybe the police officer sees his own son in that teenager with a hoodie who's kind of goofing off but not dangerous and the teenager -- maybe the teenager will see in the police officer the same words and values and authority of his parents. With an open heart, we can abandon the overheated rhetoric and the oversimplification that reduces whole categories of our fellow Americans not just to opponents, but to enemies. With an open heart, those protesting for change will guard against reckless language going forward, look at the model set by the five officers we mourn today, acknowledge the progress brought about by the sincere efforts of police departments like this one in Dallas, and embark on the hard but necessary work of negotiation, the pursuit of reconciliation. With an open heart, police departments will acknowledge that, just like the rest of us, they are not perfect; that insisting we do better to root out racial bias is not an attack on cops, but an effort to live up to our highest ideals. […] With an open heart, we can worry less about which side has been wronged, and worry more about joining sides to do right. […] We can decide to come together and make our country reflect the good inside us, the hopes and simple dreams we share.”

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)

““In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.” That’s what President Lincoln once wrote. “Honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” Mr. Speaker, leaders and members of both parties, distinguished guests: We gather here to commemorate a century and a half of freedom -- not simply for former slaves, but for all of us. Today, the issue of chattel slavery seems so simple, so obvious -- it is wrong in every sense. Stealing men, women, and children from their homelands. Tearing husband from wife, parent from child; stripped and sold to the highest bidder; shackled in chains and bloodied with the whip. It’s antithetical not only to our conception of human rights and dignity, but to our conception of ourselves -- a people founded on the premise that all are created equal.”

2015, Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the 13th Amendment (December 2015)

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom. […] Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.”

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

“Because for all the back and forth of Washington, we have to remember that this debate is about something bigger. It’s about who we are as a country, and who we want to be for future generations.
Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law? Or are we a nation that gives them a chance to make amends, take responsibility, and give their kids a better future?
Are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms? Or are we a nation that values families, and works together to keep them together?
Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs here, create businesses here, create industries right here in America?
That’s what this debate is all about. We need more than politics as usual when it comes to immigration. We need reasoned, thoughtful, compassionate debate that focuses on our hopes, not our fears.”

2014, Address to the Nation on Immigration (November 2014)

“In this tree of humanity, with all of our branches and diversity, we all go back to the same root. We’re all one family -- we're all one tribe. And yet so much of the suffering in our world stems from our failure to remember that -- to not recognize ourselves in each other. We think because somebody’s skin is slightly different, or their hair is slightly different, or their religious faith is differently expressed, or they speak a different language that it justifies somehow us treating them with less dignity. And that becomes the source of so many of our problems. And we think somehow that we make ourselves better by putting other people down. And that becomes the source of so many of our problems. When we begin to see other as somehow less than ourselves -- when we succumb to these artificial divisions of faith or sect or tribe or ethnicity -- then even the most awful abuses are justified in the minds of those who are thinking in those ways. And in the end, abusers lose their own humanity, as well.”

2015, Remarks to the People of Africa (July 2015)

“Now, what I do reject is when folks just sit on the sidelines and they're rooting for failure — whether it's on health care or energy or the economy — or the Olympics. [.. ] What I reject is when scoring political points is so important that you'd rather see failure. What I reject is when some folks want to go to the policies that helped get us into this mess in the first place — as if we don't remember. [.. ] We don't mind cleaning up the mess that was left for us. We're busy, we got our mops, we're, you know, mopping the floor here. But I don't want the folks who made the mess to just sit there and say, you're not mopping fast enough. I don't — I don't want them saying, you're not holding the mop the right way, or, that's a socialist mop. I want them to grab a mop. Grab a mop. Grab a mop — or a broom or something. Make yourself useful.”

Remarks at Chris Dodd fundraiser in Stamford, CT. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704224004574489530713762884.html <br class="br">2009

“We said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you're not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.”

Meeting with House Republicans, (January 2010) http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2440324/posts <br class="br">2010

“Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

“And as I’ve said elsewhere, a free press helps make a nation stronger and more successful, and it makes us leaders more effective because it demands greater accountability.”

Remarks by President Obama and President Kenyatta of Kenya in a Press Conference at Kenyan State House in Nairobi, Kenya (July 25, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/25/remarks-president-obama-and-president-kenyatta-kenya-press-conference <br class="br">2015