After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, "Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo's birthday!" And then Sasha added, "Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up." So it's good to have kids to keep things in perspective.
This is our first task-caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged.
Mothers are the rocks of our families and a foundation in our communities. In gratitude for their generous love, patient counsel, and lifelong support, let us pay respect to the women who carry out the hard work of motherhood with skill and grace, and let us remember those mothers who, though no longer with us, inspire us still.
When we think about immigration, we have to understand there are folks all around the world who still see America as the land of promise. And they provide us energy, and they provide us innovation. And they start companies like Intel and Google, and we want to encourage that.
Let me tell you another place to look for some savings. We are currently spending $10 billion a month in Iraq when they have a $79 billion surplus. It seems to me that if we're going to be strong at home as well as strong abroad, that we have to look at bringing that war to a close.
I'm skeptical that [the Republicans] can do [something better with healthcare] mainly because for seven years now, including when we first tried to pass health care, I said to 'em, "Okay, if [Obamacare] doesn't work tell me what does."
I don't think that there's a hard-and-fast deadline. . . .What we have said all along is that this is not an open-ended process, we are not in this just to talk for talk's sake. . . . We expect prompt, concrete steps to be taken over the next couple of weeks.
If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.
Like no other illness, AIDS tests our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes - to empathize with the plight of our fellow man. While most would agree that the AIDS orphan or the transfusion victim or the wronged wife contracted the disease through no fault of their own, it has too often been easy for some to point to the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth or the gay man and say This is your fault. You have sinned. I don't think that's a satisfactory response. My faith reminds me that we all are sinners.