Barack Obama Quotes

I do not want to criticize while my soldiers are still bleeding and dying in Iraq

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

I know some people that have gone through serious struggles. People that were close to me, and I've seen some terrible things about people who lose it. So I think that type of pain is something that's human and that, actually, can help us look at ourselves a little bit.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

War is too strange to process alone.

I think it is really sad that when people lose their homes they kind of lose their minds too.

Wolverine is a world-weary old warrior. His rage issue notwithstanding, I see him as someone with the tortured soul of a poet, but one who has seen too many friends and lovers die. Even with that, he has grown into a leader and a true hero.

…this duty lies in your path and that you ought to undertake it. If defeated, so much the better for you personally; if victorious, the greatest opportunity in the American struggle for self-government except that afforded by the Presidency will lie at your hands.

It’s the toughest decision a president has to make, by far. There is no passing the buck, no sharing the responsibility. It is a terribly lonely decision.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

Things don’t go well in war. You make mistakes.

Wars are detested by mothers.

It is not easy to talk about peace to people who are mourning every day.

English Prime Ministers and American Presidents, it’s amazing how many of them have lost a parent in their childhood.

I've never been to war, and I would never presume to fully understand the horrors that that kind of experience can impart.

I think that as president of Poland, I can speak about the suffering.

During the course of my presidency, it feels as if a couple times a year, I end up having to speak to the country and to speak to a particular community about a devastating loss. The grieving that the country feels is real, the sympathy, the prioritizing, the comforting of the families, all that’s important. But I think part of the point that I wanted to make was that it’s not enough just to feel bad.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button the bright splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep. War is kind.

And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.

The poor fatherless baby of eight months is now the utterly broken-hearted and crushed widow of forty-two! My life as a happy one is ended! the world is gone for me! If I must live on (and I will do nothing to make me worse than I am), it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children - for my unhappy country, which has lost all in losing him - and in only doing what I know and feel he would wish.

Five hundred souls. I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the the children I carried in my arms.

I'm not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.

President means chief servant