Toughest decision was early in my presidency when I ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. As somebody who had run to end a large troop presence overseas.

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.

Joy gives you strength.Hope gives you fortitude.Faith gives you courage.Love gives you power.

You got to face your evil, Hoodoo, " Zeke said. "If people don't face the danger that's seeking them, evil will find them first.

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.

Perhaps you should put your head down.” I knew this was the thing to do, although I’ve never fainted and I don’t intend to.

Reality is devoid of any intrinsic identity that can be captured by any one single proposition - that is what Buddha meant by "voidness."

Dieu, c'est le voile mystérieux sous lequel nous cachons notre ignorance de la cause première. God is the mysterious veil under which we hide our ignorance of the cause.

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

Black absorbs all color, accepts them, takes them into it and let them define it. Gray isn't anything but itself. It absorbs nothing but itself.

There's a lovely freedom of will when you approach a character that no one has really come across before, because it is your own interpretation.

There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence.