Barack Hussein Obama (b.1961) is a Democratic-party political leader who served as the 44th president of the United States 2009–17. He was the first African American to serve the presidency.
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Kenyan father and an American mother, Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. He studied political science at Columbia University and law at Harvard. After working as a civil rights lawyer and a lecturer in constitutional law, he was elected to the Illinois Senate and then the U.S. Senate.
Despite his inexperience, Obama’s stimulating public speaking, combined with his emergence as the embodiment of “change,” gave him a decisive victory in the 2008 presidential elections. He was elected to a second term in 2012.
President Obama faced fiercely partisan opposition in Congress but achieved health care reform, the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the reinstatement of the standing of America abroad. His presidency was characterized by intense political polarization that culminated in the election of flamboyant businessman Donald Trump, who started to undo the achievements of the Obama presidency.
Obama wrote his compelling personal narrative in his bestselling memoirs Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006.) He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Barack Obama
We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.
—Barack Obama
Topics: Excellence
Instead of having a set of policies that are equipping people for the globalization of the economy, we have policies that are accelerating the most destructive trends of the global economy.
—Barack Obama
A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, “Huh. It works. It makes sense.”
—Barack Obama
More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world–a place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward.
—Barack Obama
Topics: Libraries
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. … Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
—Barack Obama
Topics: Wealth
Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
—Barack Obama
Topics: Change
If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.
—Barack Obama
Topics: Success
Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect. A year passes and you know you feel differently, but you’re not sure what or why or how, so your mind casts back for something that might give that difference shape: a word, a glance, a touch.
—Barack Obama
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