Why, child, such things are to be decided only by you and my son.

When all of Europe put into practice the ideas which he had preached, he came to live in America.

You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

Hope -- Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us...A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life-- what you look like,where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home--none of that is an excuse... where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No ones written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write you own destiny.You make your own future.

The title of Reverend Wright's sermon that morning was "The Audacity of Hope.

You have the ability and gifts to do whatever you want. It is your turn now to change the world. Yes we can!

More than anyone, this book is for those young people—an invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.

The name's Obama. Where do I belong?

We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

Maybe nothing would come of my Cairo speech. Maybe the dysfunction of the Middle East would play itself out regardless of what I did. Maybe the best we could hope for was to placate men like Mubarak and kill those who would try to kill us. Maybe, as the Pyramids had whispered, none of it mattered in the long run. But on the only scale that any of us can truly comprehend, the span of centuries, the actions of an American president sixty-five years earlier had set the world on a better course.

Justifying the past mattered less than planning what to do next.