Obama: People Are Feeling Depressed About Where the Course of the Country and the World Going

EXCERPT:

OBAMA: "One of the things I always tell the folks who work with me is you have to maintain two seemingly contradictory areas ideas in your head at the same time. One is you should be extraordinarily impatient about the injustice and nonsense and foolishness that you see around you, and you should be finding opportunities at every juncture to challenge those things. And you have to at the same time keep in your mind that societies are these incredibly complex organic things that you don't turn switches on all right, they evolve and they shift and they change and they move in unexpected ways and sometimes you're going to go forward for a good period of time and then you're going to slip back and you're going to take a detour. And I was talking to a friend of mine backstage who -- you know there's a conversation I often have here lately, which is they're feeling depressed about where's the course of the country and the world going. And you know what I had to remind them is look this this is what happens in societies.”