The best education I received was working with people in the community on a grassroots basis. Because what it taught me was that ordinary people, when they are working together can do extraordinary things.

A number of countries, including some who have loudly criticized the NSA, privately acknowledge that America has special responsibilities as the world's only superpower, that our intelligence capabilities are critical to meeting these responsibilities, and that they themselves have relied on the information we obtain to protect their own people.

It is important to combine structural reforms and good fiscal stewardship with a growth strategy, because when your economy's growing and more revenue's coming in, that helps relieve debt.

This is what I would call old politics. This is the stuff we're trying to get rid of. Because the problem is, when we start breaking down into conservative and liberal, and we've got a bunch of set predispositions, whether it's on gun control, or its' on health care, any attempt to do health care is socialized medicine.

We buy our own toilet paper even here in the White House.

There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.

Everything we've done has been designed to make sure that we address that number one priority. That's what the sanctions regime was all about. That's how we were able to mobilize the international community, including some folks that we are not particularly close to, to abide by these sanctions. That's how these crippling sanctions came about, was because we [USA] were able to gain global consensus that Iran having a nuclear weapon would be a problem for everybody.