We invest in early childhood education. We invest additional job training dollars. We make sure that we've got a strong research and development strategy so that we continue to innovate. Rebuilding our infrastructure, which we know will attract businesses.
...as parents, we have to find the time and the energy to step in and help our children love reading. We can read to them, talk to them about what they're reading, and make time for this by turning off the television set ourselves. Libraries are a critical tool to help parents do this.
Without investments in research and science that will create the next Apple, create the next new innovation that will sell products around the world, we will lose. If we're not training engineers to make sure that they are equipped here in this country, then companies won't come here. Those investments are what's going to help to make sure that we continue to lead this world economy not just next year, but 10 years from now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now.
I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the road blocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.
On Easter or Christmas Day, my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites.
I think that to the extent that we focus on problems where we can build a moral and a political consensus, then I think that we move the country forward and when we are divided and our politics is focused on dividing, then I think we're less successful, not just from the perspective of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party but from the perspective of the nation as a whole.
Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military.
There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.
I would say of all the things that have happened during the course of my presidency the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask myself what might I have done differently along the course of the last five, six years.
Unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country's energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers.
Year after year, an ideological and economic barrier hardened between our two countries, meanwhile, the Cuban exile community in the United States made enormous contributions to our country, in politics, in business, culture and sports.
On Easter I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian I am supposed to love, and I have to say that sometimes, when I've listened to less-than-loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned.
The number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it's less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it's in the tens of thousands. And for us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing.