I've said this time and again: My greatest concern coming into the White House was making sure my girls came out whole and normal, and decent and kind, just like I would expect them to if we were living on the South Side of Chicago. And it takes work to keep White House life normal for the kids.
People still assume the White House Correspondents' Association works for the White House, when in reality, it's a group of journalists who cover the White House. It's a branding thing, but because it has the 'White House' before it, people think they're just King Joffrey's goons.
It is a bizarre thought that in this [U.S. 2008] presidential cycle we could have had a woman in the White House we might have a black man in the White House but if either of them had said they were atheists neither of them would have had a hope in hell.
You never have a normal family relationship in the White House; it's an impossible thing to have. You live in a goldfish bubble, and you snatch what you can for a personal life, but you never have a normal, natural existence.
Selfishly, working with kids gives me joy - it makes me feel like my life has a purpose. And I thought, Imagine what we can do in the White House, particularly with the kids in the D.C. area, many of whom have never set foot on the White House lawn.
One strategy that the tea party smartly embraced was one of being almost entirely defensive. They consciously decided not to figure out which of their really abominable conservative policy priorities to prioritize. Instead, anything that came out of the Obama White House they were against. What they recognized is that when you've lost the White House and the House of Representatives and the Senate, you're not setting the agenda anymore. We progressives find ourselves in a similar situation now.
The way that house music has become so white and so sanitized over the decades and the fact it's still going on, well I think it's sad really, but at the time I really loved it. I loved all the black house music that was coming out of Chicago and New Jersey, which I just thought was really soulful.
I feel like Barack Obama's an Illuminati puppet. He's basically dragged this country down into the worst it's ever been. Like I say about the White House, 'You've built this house of shame'. Everybody looked up at the White House and America and now I think it's like a house of shame. I miss the old days when people were proud to be American.
We think it's time for the president Donald Trump to announce steps for the White House to undertake. We'd like to see a White House task force on hate crimes. This could be something again convened by the attorney general, but you would bring to bear DHS, the Department of Education, the FBI and other federal agencies to use all of their resources to deal with this problem.
It is clear that many of [Republicans] do not want to try to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. So if it's not important to keep her out of the White House, why is it important to elect you?
I am shocked at how much time I spend in the White House. I mean, you know, for people on the outside, the idea of going to the White House for a meeting must seem like the most important, serious, even glamorous kind of thing to do.
I did a lot of work on energy efficiency at the White House. By the time I left we had taken the equivalent of six hundred cars a year off the road in reduced greenhouse gas emissions just in the White House complex.
The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.
When I worked in the White House in the 1970s and '80s, I was often stopped within the White House by agents checking my credentials. They were very observant and would stop anyone they didn't recognize.
The White House used to be, everybody looked up at the White House and America and everything, and now I think it's like a house of shame.
I've been invited to the White House about five times. I think the greatest thing would be if they actually invited everybody to the White House every night... they'd just take about 500 people a night. Everybody would just love this country because it's so thrilling to go there. It really is.
As long as Negro leader is making the white man think that our people are satisfied to sit in his house and wait for him to correct these conditions, he is - he is misrepresenting the thinking of the black masses, and he's doing the white man a disservice because he's making the white man be more complacent than he would be if he knew the dangerous situation that is building up right inside his own house.