The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting.

I found this national debt doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom. ...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.

I wish I could say I was shocked at the reports the NSA is secretly spying on the private phone calls of millions of Verizon customers. However, this is a predictable result of a government that continues to erode our liberties while promising some glimmering hope of security.

I learned to be far more skeptical of what I'm told by presidents, no matter who the presidents are, and also to be much more cautious, always, in any action or vote that could lead to the use of American military power and most particularly what we call 'boots on the ground.'

When you want a nation, that's called nationalism... Black nationalism. A revolutionary is a Black nationalist. He wants a nation.