I'm named Barack Hussein Obama. I'm African-­American.

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.

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

If you think training is expensive, try ignorance.

When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.

When you're surrounded by stupidity, self-preservation isn't a sin.

If you don’t hurt others it doesn’t mean you love them but it simply reveals that you are loving.

I think the worst thing [Donald Trump]did was the tweet the other night about illegal votes.

The ability of the market to serve society gas been and is continually being undermined by the attacks levelled by its ideological opponents.

Success is about creating benefit for all and enjoying the process. If you focus on this & adopt this definition, success is yours.

I like the way the prose and poetry interact.