“In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
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Barack Obama
“Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up”
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Barack Obama
“doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”
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Barack Obama
“And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.”
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Barack Obama
“Change will not happen if we wait for another person or another time. We are the person that we are waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
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Barack Obama
“Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes.”
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Barack Obama
“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes....”
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Barack Obama
“inexhaustible...our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.”
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Barack Obama
“But that’s part of what makes America wonderful, is we always had this nagging dissatisfaction that spurs us on. That’s how we ended up going west, that’s how we--“I’m tired of all these people back east; if I go west, there’s going to be my own land and I’m not going to have to put up with this nonsense, and I’m going to start my own thing, and I’ve got my homestead.” ...It is true, though, that that restlessness and that dissatisfaction which has helped us go to the moon and create the Internet and build the Transcontinental Railroad and build our land-grant colleges, that those things, born of dissatisfaction, we can very rapidly then take for granted and not tend to and not defend, and not understand how precious these things are.”
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Barack Obama
“I've got daughters. Nine years old and six years old. First of all, I'm gonna teach them about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them PUNISHED with a baby.”
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Barack Obama
“Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.”
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Barack Obama
“To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”
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Barack Obama
“it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight!”
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Barack Obama