Is this money well spent? This is taxpayer money, it is going to be adding to the deficit short term and if we can't justify it, then we're not going to spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, just to make somebody happy, if it's not good for the economy.

We can't afford more top-down economics. What we need are policies that will grow and strengthen the middle class.

I try to explain to them about the aloha spirit. And it's that spirit that I am absolutely convinced is what America is looking for right now.

Nothing will deter us from building the future we want for our children. What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it.

I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion-dollar deficit. ... This notion that somehow we caused the deficits is just wrong. It's just not true. ... If they start trying to give you a bunch of facts and figures suggesting that it's true, what they're not telling you is they baked all this stuff into the cake with those tax cuts and a prescription drug plan that they didn't pay for and the wars.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

[White House] feels even more like home now because you have all these memories that were formed watching your kids grow up.