I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you. I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.
To be quite honest, numbers don't tell you everything because audience reactions differ. Some of the biggest films at the box office are not necessarily films that everyone has loved, they just opened to a good response.
The American story has never been about things coming easy. It has been about rising to the moment when the moment is hard. About rejecting panicked division for purposeful unity. About seeing a mountaintop from the deepest valley. That is why we remember that some of the most famous words ever spoken by an American came from a president who took office in a time of turmoil: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
The superior man does not mind being in office; all he minds about is whether he has qualities that entitle him to office. He does not mind failing to get recognition; he is too busy doing the things that entitle him to recognition.
Politics comes and goes, but your principles don't. And everybody wants to be loved -- not everybody. ... You never heard anybody say, 'I want to be despised, I'm running for office.'
If I stay on for the time being, bearing the burden at my age, it is not because of love for power or office. I have had an ample share of both. If I stay it is because I have a feeling that I may, through things that have happened, have an influence about what I care about above all else, the building of a sure and lasting peace.
That sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath. Very rarely did I lose it publicly. Yeah, usually I'd just smile.
Who you are, what you are, does not change after you occupy the oval office. All it does is magnify who you are. All it does is shine a spotlight on who you are.
If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.
I don't have my diploma from the University of Nebraska hanging on my office wall, and I don't have my diploma from Columbia up there either-but I do have my Dale Carnegie graduation certificate proudly displayed.
The capital gains tax is 15 percent now. So I sit there in my office and I make a lot of money by capital gains, and I pay 15 percent, and I pay no payroll tax on it.
I'm harmless. I don't have any ill will or ill thought towards anybody. When people know you're that way, you can say stuff that the creepy guy at your office could never get away with.
For will anyone dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never seen an office, who says so.