Barack Obama

[on Michelle] A dedicated mom, a good friend, and someone who’s not afraid to poke a little fun at herself from time to time

You can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom’. If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean that you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

My first four jobs were minimum wage or close to it.

[living at the White House] This isn’t about us. There’s so much history here that no one family can claim this space as their own.

If you were going to list the 100 most popular things that I have done as president. Being married to Michelle Obama is number one.

Popularity may be united with hostility to the rights of the people, and the secret slave of tyranny may be the professed lover of freedom.

Can you imagine what the outcry would be if Snoop Dogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!

The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It’s very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can’t fight the world alone.

Americans have a severe disease – worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex.

The Creel [propaganda] Commission…succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist [U.S.] population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.

It’s the first time in American history that a candidate [Sanders] probably could have won, if it hadn’t been for party managers who kept him out, with no funding from the corporate sector, and no funding from the wealthy, and no media support.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

Edward Bernays’ next famous achievement was Guatemala. He took over, at the request of the United Fruit Company, public relations activities to try to lay the basis for the U.S.-backed invasion, which destroyed an experiment in Guatemalan democracy…

Your commanders have ordered you to storm the White House and to arrest me. But I as the elected President of Russia give you the order to turn your tanks and not to fight against your own people.

There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely.

When violence against women is no longer societally accepted, no longer kept secret; when everyone understands that even one case is too many. That’s when it will change.

To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed … There is nothing sweeter in the world.

…the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

And [Saudi Arabia] is strongly backed by the United States and its allies, Britain and France. Reason? It’s got a lot of oil. It’s got a lot of money. You can sell them a lot of arms, I think tens of billions of dollars of arms.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.