As president, I'm committed to making Washington work better and rebuilding the trust of the people who sent us here.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

There is no such thing as a beauty contest . . . Beauty is noncompetitive. Beauty of any kind stands alone, unmatched, inimitable, uncontested.

Because I'm a monster, like my father before me and his father before him, and so on. There is no help for me.

Which is, I'm an optimist that two people can be together to work out their conflicts. And that commitment, I think, might be what love is, because they both grow from their relationship.

Live with honor and follow your conscience.

Saying and Doing, have quarrel'd and parted.

My work is a support system for people to feel good about themselves.

... since God commanded me to go, I must do it.

Every kind of writing is hypocritical.

The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the wardrobe of an 18th-century marchioness.