50 Inspirational Barack Obama Quotes on Life, Hope and Change
Updated: Feb. 25, 2024
These are some of the greatest Barack Obama quotes to help you stay motivated each and every day
In the chronicles of America, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama made history as the first African American president and first lady. As the 44th president, Obama served two terms, from 2009 to 2017, not only leaving a lasting mark on the political landscape, but also inspiring the nation with motivational quotes on life, hope, education and the power of change. So in light of Black History Month and Presidents Day, indulge in the many Barack Obama quotes below.
Barack Obama’s quotes resonate with themes of unity, progress and inclusivity—and they can help you embody a spirit of resilience while offering a glimpse into the mind of a visionary leader and his historic presidency.
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Barack Obama quotes about life
1. “I’m inspired by the people I meet in my travels—hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I’m inspired by the love people have for their children. And I’m inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man.”
2. “If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.”
3. “I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody’s religious beliefs—including my own—on nonbelievers.”
4. “What I’ve realized is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re willing to do your small part to leave our children—all of our children—a better world. Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”
5. “It’s important to make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
6. “Even when folks are hitting you over the head, you can’t stop marching. Even when they’re turning the hose on you, you can’t stop.”
7. “No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom.’ If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
8. “Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”
9. “The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”
10. “Our stories may be singular, but our destination is shared.”
11. “Enthusiasm makes up for a host of deficiencies.”
12. “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.”
13. “I suspect that God’s plan, whatever it is, works on a scale too large to admit our mortal tribulations; that in a single lifetime, accidents and happenstance determine more than we care to admit; and that the best we can do is to try to align ourselves with what we feel is right and construct some meaning out of our confusion, and with grace and nerve play at each moment the hand that we’re dealt.”
14. “Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up.”
15. “Fixing a broken immigration system. Protecting our kids from gun violence. Equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage. All these things still matter to hardworking families; they are still the right thing to do; and I will not let up until they get done.”
16. “Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends—honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.”
Barack Obama quotes about hope
17. “The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
18. “The absence of hope can rot a society from within.”
19. “In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
20. “Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.”
21. “Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”
22. “America will rise again. And hope will rise again.”
23. “While we breathe, we will hope.”
24. “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.”
25. “It’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”
26. “But you don’t choose the time. The time chooses you. Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide you’re willing to live with the knowledge that the chance has passed you by.”
27. “Have you ever noticed that if there’s a hard way and an easy way, you choose the hard way every time? Why do you think that is?”
28. “We are a people of improbable hope.”
29. “I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope.”
30. “Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn’t there before.”
31. “You have the ability and gifts to do whatever you want. It is your turn now to change the world.”
32. “Reading is important. If you know how to read then the whole world opens up to you.”
Barack Obama quotes about change
33. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time.”
34. “A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.”
35. “We are the change we have been waiting for.”
36. “In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”
37. “One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.”
38. “We don’t ask you to believe in our ability to bring change, rather, we ask you to believe in yours.”
39. “Nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.”
40. “Change is never easy, but always possible.”
41. “This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.”
42. “Building new roads and bridges creates jobs. Growing our exports creates jobs. Reforming our outdated tax system and our broken immigration system creates jobs.”
43. “The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.”
44. “No one’s written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”
45. “All the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.”
46. “Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.”
47. “This is the moment we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”
48. “Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world.”
49. “What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal—that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.”
50. “We are made for this moment, and we will seize it—so long as we seize it together.”
