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"There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion."
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"I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world."
"No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision."
"Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles."
"For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery."
"The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop."
"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."
"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you."
"In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population."
"On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does."
"Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated."
Explore more quotes by Barack Obama
"What I've realized is that life doesn't count for much unless you're willing to do your small part to leave our children - all of our children - a better world. Any fool can have a child. That doesn't make you a father. It's the courage to raise a child that makes you a father."
"We also can't try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That's not leadership; that's a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It's the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq - and we should have learned it by now."
"I've never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting."
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."
"We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them,and drives us further apart."
"If everybody that voted in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election. We will win this election."
"Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don't like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship."
"Now we're in the midst of not just advocating for change, not just calling for change - we're doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change - inch by inch, day by day."
"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
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