Like myself, President Obama is the father of two daughters. He understands the obstacles that they face as women, but he also understands the emergency of the state of young black men in America.
Populists feed on democratic dysfunction. As long as democratic elites and institutions in advanced industrial democracies remain unable or unwilling to tackle the myriad challenges facing their societies, we should expect populism to remain an attractive political option.
Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.
The issues are by some geometric number - 100 or 200 or 500 - times more complicated today than we appreciated them to be when Franklin Roosevelt was around.
It's just hard to meet new people, in my position.
Mexican immigration poses challenges to our policies and to our identity in a way nothing else has in the past.
It's hard to create new friendships outside sports.
There is a lot of talent in our slums.
As you get older, you realize just figuring out how to be nice to the people in your personal sphere is almost more challenging than trying to change the bigger culture.
We see incredible opportunity to solve some of the biggest social challenges we have by combining high-performance computing and AI - such as climate change and more.
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
We can no longer pretend that business is immune from the rising tide of environmental or social challenges or that companies can create value in isolation from the communities of which they are a part.
If answers to our national problems were [readily] available we would not have to spend all our time talking about them.
Community life is not easy for somebody like me, who is used to living by himself and doing what he wants. It's a demanding life, and you quickly get in touch with your own handicaps and weaknesses.
The biggest battle that I have is being a woman in the world. That takes center stage for me.
I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but I lived in Brooklyn for a while as a kid. I went to junior high school there. Girls in Brooklyn have to be tough - I mean real tough - just to get by. It's life in the combat zone.
Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised
We have a number of difficulties facing our nation, but I believe fatherlessness is right at the top of the list.
I grew up in one of the most deprived parts of Britain. I know the problems which inner-city children face.
We have problems which will be addressed by Haitians.
Adolescence in our culture for a young woman, for a girl, is a hard road.
School is tough sometimes, but it’s all about knowing who your real friends are.
It is our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them, and have the honesty to say to people, 'There are no easy solutions here.'
School, in general, was not great. Children are just mean to each other... but by high school, I probably stopped being annoying to people, and people stopped being mean. By the end of it, it was wonderful.
I thought school was immensely boring, and as a teenager, I often found social life quite mystifying... I was not someone to whom it came easily to be charming.
