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?
Barack ObamaThat's what building a body of work is all about. It's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star, because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative. It deepens and expands with each day you give your best. You may have setbacks and you may have failures, but you're not done.
Barack ObamaWe have to deal with the 11 million individuals who are here illegally. The bill that Senator [Marco] Rubio put forward, I think is a great place to start.
Barack ObamaWhat you saw was the people of New York having a debate, talking through these issues. It was contentious. It was emotional. But ultimately, they made a decision to recognize civil marriage. And I think that's exactly how things should work.
Barack ObamaHillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy. And what I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there's classified and then there's classified. There's stuff that is really top secret top secret, and there's stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom or, you know, going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open source.
Barack Obama