“No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom’. If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”

A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.

A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.

If you’re a strong man, you should not feel threatened by strong women.

We are the change we have been waiting for.

What makes you a man is not the ability to make a child, it’s the courage to raise one.

Love and hope can conquer hate.

To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.

If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Together we resolve that a great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

There is no excuse for not trying.

Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.

The opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.

Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

When times get tough, we don’t give up. We get up.

The future must not belong to those who bully women. It must be shaped by girls who go to school and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons.

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me-and continues to teach me-strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace.

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.

I always knew I would be successful. So there was no element of surprise.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.