Senator Obama Quotes & Sayings

Senator Obama will be taking office at a critical juncture. There are many pressing challenges facing the international community, including the global financial crisis and global warming. We look forward to working closely with President-elect Obama and his team to address these challenges. — Helen Clark

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, said that Republicans' number one priority was the defeat of President Obama. — Steny Hoyer

In 2008, as a matter of fact, I had people accusing me of being a Senator Obama supporter because I wouldn't slam him. I said, 'Well, consider the fact that I voted for impeachment for President Clinton, but it wasn't a personal vote. I voted based on the facts and the law and the Constitution and what we were dealing with.' — J. C. Watts

I've been an Obama supporter since he announced he was campaigning. I was aware of him as a senator, but I wasn't as engaged as I probably should've been. — Pete Wentz

When President Obama was in the Senate, when he was a U.S. senator, he voted against raising the debt ceiling. And he said it was a lack of leadership that had brought us to this point. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

After President Obama announced his support for net neutrality yesterday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz tweeted that 'Net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet.' While Ted Cruz continues to be the Taylor Swift of not getting over Obamacare. — Jimmy Fallon

The Bill of Rights existed long before President Obama was elected, and as long as I'm a U.S. Senator, I will fight to protect the basic rights and liberties that belong to all of us as American citizens. — Rand Paul

Rand Paul just came out with an appeal for a new organization that will counter the efforts by Obama and Hillary Clinton to shred the last remnants of our sovereignty by allowing the United Nations to take away our guns.6 And then, of course, they will come and conquer us. The basis for this is that the UN is now debating a small arms treaty.7 Small arms doesn't mean pistols. It means anything less than a tank. These are just slaughtering people all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of people every year are killed with small arms, and a high percentage come from the United States.8 So there is an effort to have some sort of small arms treaty to regulate their flow. In the minds of the Rand Paul libertarians, this is just another effort by this ominous, fiendish outfit, the United Nations, to take away our freedom. Rand Paul is the Republican senator from Kentucky and son of Ron Paul. — Noam Chomsky

Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain. — Thomas Sowell

I would like to mention that a couple days ago Senator Obama was out in Ohio and he had an encounter with a guy who's a plumber, his name is Joe Wurzelbacher. — John McCain

The first time I met President Obama was 2006 in Baghdad. He was the senator from Illinois; it was a month before he actually ended up declaring. He had to come to Baghdad to kind of check that box, and I was the correspondent for 'Newsweek' at the time. — Michael Hastings

If he'd been negotiating Obamacare, Lincoln would have made the infamous 'Cornhusker Kickback' deal - $100 million in Medicaid funds for Nebraska to secure a Senator's vote - in a heartbeat, even if the press howled as it did when Barack Obama agreed to it, forcing its cancellation. — Joe Klein

By dint of vision, and determination, and most of all faith in the redeeming power of love, he endured the humiliation of arrest, the loneliness of a prison cell, the constant threats to his life, until he finally inspired a nation to transform itself, and begin to live up to the meaning of its creed. - Senator Obama — Barack Obama

Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. — Zadie Smith

I have respect for Senator McCain. I used to like him a lot. I supported him. I raised a lot of money for his campaign against President Obama. — Donald Trump

Really, an historic night last night. You may have heard, Barack Obama will be the first black president of the United States of America ... Obama is also the first Democrat to receive more than 50 percent of the vote since Jimmy Carter, the first senator to be elected since Jack Kennedy, the first Muslim to be ... I said too much. — Jon Stewart

I've said this before and I'm very proud of it, that when it comes to judgment, having run a hard race against Senator [Barack] Obama at the time, he turned to me to be secretary of State. And when it comes to the biggest counterterrorism issues that we faced in this administration, namely whether or not to go after bin Laden, I was at that table, I was exercising my judgment to advise the president on what to do, on that, on Iran, on Russia on China, on a whole raft of issues. — Hillary Clinton

The Republicans want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, I want to improve it. I want to build on it, get the costs down, get prescription drug costs down. Senator Sanders wants us to start all over again. This was a major achievement of President [Barack] Obama, of our country. It is helping people right now. — Hillary Clinton

Virtually every one of the most far-right neocon Bush officials - including Dick Cheney himself - has spent years now praising Obama for continuing their terrorism policies which Obama the Senator and Presidential Candidate once so harshly denounced. — Glenn Greenwald

The only candidate to really escape Trump's wrath has been Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and that's because Cruz has spent the entire political season nuzzling Trump's ankles, praising the Donald like a lovesick cellmate. The Texas senator, whose rhetorical schtick is big doses of Tea Party crazy (his best line was that Obama wanted to bring "expanded Medicaid" to ISIS) — Matt Taibbi

I want to say with the utmost of sincerity, not as a Republican, but as an American, that I have great respect for Senator Obama's historic achievement to become his party's nominee, not because of his color, but with indifference to it. — Mike Huckabee

I simply cannot vote for Senator Obama because he's not pro-life. — Alveda King

There are some who might say that somebody named Barack Obama can't be elected senator in the state of Illinois. They're probably the same folks who said that a guy named Rod Blagojevich couldn't be elected governor of the state of Illinois. — Barack Obama

When Hillary Clinton ran against Senator [Barack] Obama she thought him naive because he thought it was a good idea to talk to our enemies. I think those are exactly the people you have to talk to and you have to negotiate with. — Bernie Sanders

Senator Barack Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who I think can do great things for our country. — Joe Lieberman

Senator Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who can do great things for our country in the years ahead. But my friends, eloquence is no substitute for a record - not in these tough times for America. In the Senate he has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party. — Joe Lieberman

Often President Obama's worst critics are Senator Obama and candidate Obama. — Peter Schiff

There's a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out: 'Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, I'm entitled to my own opinion." To which Moynihan frostily replied, "You are entitled to you own opinion, but you are not entitled to you own facts. — Barack Obama

My endorsement of Senator Obama will not be welcome news to my friends and family at the Clinton campaign. — Joe Andrew

If Senator Obama becomes pro-life then I'll consider giving him my vote. — Alveda King

This book [Dreams from My Father] was more of a reflection on my public life, now as a U.S. senator and before that as a state senator; how my perspectives around the issues of the day are shaped by my background. — Barack Obama

Well, he's scoring in that video." "That guy wasn't guarding him. Obama is POTUS. He is mother-effing POTUS. And even if he wasn't POTUS, Obama still had that ball hanging out so far that anybody could have blocked it. You could have blocked it, Ed. That shit was as weak as the public option in health care. If Obama pulled that on me, I'd block it like some racist-ass redneck senator from Alabama. — Sherman Alexie

Senator Obama voted against Justice Breyer and Justice Roberts on the grounds that they didn't meet his ideological standards. That's not the way we should judge these nominees. Elections have consequences. — John McCain

There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries special relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South's weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Decade after decade, courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B Russell of Georgia used the filibuster to choke off any and every piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair employment bills, or anti-lynching bills. — Barack Obama

In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected. — Elliott Abrams

When people ask me why I'm amazed at what Barack Obama has accomplished, I tell them it's not because of what most of America and the world sees and knows of his history. It's because I witnessed what I can only describe as a bizarre turn of events that thrust him into position to even become a U.S. senator. — Don Lemon

After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of moral indecision and equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next. — Sarah Palin

I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

The election of Senator Barack Obama brought jubilation across Africa, where millions celebrated him as 'one of their own.' — George Ayittey

Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a ten percent chance on change. — Barack Obama

Senator Joe Biden is pretty clean and articulate for a white guy. — Barack Obama

Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for "going to zero." The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn't heard the leaders of any other nuclear country - Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan - signal the same intent. — Robert M. Gates

Every day, President Obama and Senator McCaskill are making it harder for working mothers and women of all ages to find a good-paying job. They continue to dictate to our families how they should live, stripping them of opportunities and freedom. — Sarah Steelman

I take a backseat to no one in my affection, respect and devotion to veterans. And I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did. — John McCain

I am encouraged President Obama now says he will fulfill his constitutional obligation to seek authorization for any potential military action in Syria. This is the most important decision any President or any Senator must make, and it deserves vigorous debate — Rand Paul

It's a matter of fact that Senator Obama has spent more money on negative ads than any political campaign in history. — John McCain

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my disappointment - especially those who were filled with great hope a few years ago, when then-Senator Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois. — Paul Ryan

We have to deal with the 11 million individuals who are here illegally. The bill that Senator [Marco] Rubio put forward, I think is a great place to start. — Barack Obama

I traveled with then-Senator Obama to Israel in 2008. I will never forget our time in the holy city of Jerusalem and following behind him as he approached the Western Wall - and even in the dark hours of that very early morning, it was a place bustling with energy afforded by one's faith. — Denis McDonough

As a physician and a U.S. senator, I have warned since the very beginning about many troubling aspects of Mr. Obama's unprecedented health-insurance mandate. Not only does he believe he can order you to buy insurance, the president also incorrectly equates health insurance coverage with medical care. — John Barrasso

Maybe I'm too close to the two Democrats to be against either one. I went to law school with Barack Obama and worked in the Clinton White House, so I have connections and allegiances to both candidates [ ... ] But I cannot remain silent any longer while my own senator destroys the Democratic Party, and her own reputation, in a desperate and degrading effort to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's time for Senator Clinton to act like a leader that I know she can be. Hillary Clinton not only needs to defend Barack Obama, she needs to apologize to him. — Keith Boykin

You may have noticed that Senator Obama's supporters have been saying some pretty nasty things about western Pennsylvania lately. And you know, I couldn't agree with them more. — John McCain

Look, we live in a celebrity culture and sometimes you get caught in the wave and the buzz and a lot of it's flattering but, you know, one of the things that I try to remind people of is, is that I was in politics as a state senator operating in obscurity for many years. Before that I was a community organizer working in low income communities in Chicago and nobody knew my name then. And so, having involved myself in public service for a pretty long time without getting too much attention, hopefully I can keep some of the attention that I'm getting now in perspective. — Barack Obama

I've been critical of Hillary Clinton and [Barack] Obama, for sure. But John McCain had a proven record as a senator. He also ran for president [in 2016]. But he got a lot of stuff done while he was a United States senator and still does. — Jeb Bush

There are now reports that President Obama will name Massachusetts Senator John Kerry to be the next secretary of defense. Apparently this is part of America's new defense strategy to bore our enemies to death. — Jay Leno

There was always this sense, even early on in the campaign, that if the senator Obama could score this upset victory in Iowa, that there was a pretty good chance that he would end up being president of the United States. — Josh Earnest

Republicans also have to start to look at talent recruitment. Eight years ago Barack Obama was a no-name state senator. So I think we need to look outside the Beltway and start to look at a younger, more diverse pool of people and tap them to run for office instead of continuously tapping the same type of self-funder individual that Republicans seem to go after every time. — Andrea Tantaros

No president in modern times has come to power with less political experience or less managerial experience. On the other hand, no president has come to power with a clearer record of political extremism. As senator, Barack Obama had the most left-wing voting record in the Senate ... — Bob Tyrrell

You see, even though back then Barack was a senator and a presidential candidate, to me, he was still the guy who'd picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door. He was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he'd found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small. — Michelle Obama

Senator Obama's message of hope is not just for America's future, it is also a message of hope for the world as well. A world which is now in many respects fearful for its future. — Kevin Rudd

I could have possibly beaten Senator McCain in the primary. Then I could have been the candidate who lost to Barack Obama. — Mitt Romney