Restore America's place in leading the free world

"This is close to a miracle. I was certain that some things will not happen in my lifetime," said Sunila Patel, 62, a widow encountered on the streets of New Delhi. "A black president of the U.S. will mean that there will be more American tolerance for people around the world who are different."

"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, a place that is open-minded enough to have a woman or an African American as its president," said Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.

Sam Onyango, a water vendor in Kisumu, Kenya, said that "Obama's victory means I might one day get to America and share the dreams I have always heard about. He will open doors for us there in the spirit of African brotherhood."

For many, Obama's skin color is deeply symbolic. As the son of an African and a white woman from Kansas, Obama has the brownish "everyman" skin color shared by hundreds of millions of people. "He looks like Egyptians. You can walk in the streets and find people who really look like him," said Manar el-Shorbagi, a specialist in U.S. political affairs at the Cairo university.

Still, some Russians hope that a new American president will improve strained relations between Washington and Moscow. "Barack Obama looks like the candidate that can be expected to take the greatest strides towards Russia," Konstantin Kosachev, a member of parliament, wrote in the newspaper Kommersant. "Unlike McCain he's not infected with any Cold War phobias."

- Quoted in The Washington Post