You can think of a Python statement as being similar to a sentence in English: it's the smallest unit of the language that makes sense by itself. Just like "I," "like," and "Spam" aren't statements by themselves, but "I like Spam" is, variables and data types aren't statements in Python, but they are the building blocks that form them.
To continue the sentence analogy, it's clear that we also need a kind of punctuation to make it obvious where one statement ends and another begins. If you're familiar with JavaScript, you know that statements end with a semicolon (;
). In Python, statements are separated by whitespace. Just like you can't toss around semicolons wherever you want in JS, you can't throw whitespace around in Python.
This may take some getting used to, especially if you're coming from a programming language where whitespace doesn't matter.