“But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools - a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.”
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Barack Obama
“I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.”
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Barack Obama
“This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.”
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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
“education available to millions, government has helped”
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Barack Obama
“The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.”
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Barack Obama
“There was something to what he said, for it was true that the people I met on the job were generally much older than me, with a set of concerns and demands that created barriers to friendship. When I wasn’t working, the weekends would usually find me alone in an empty apartment, making do with the company of books. I”
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Barack Obama
“When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president…the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy." President Obama, in conversation with Marilynne Robinson, in New York Review of Books”
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Barack Obama
“I've been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.”
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Barack Obama
“I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.”
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Barack Obama
“the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.”
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Barack Obama
“Di Indonesia, kekuasaan diperlihatkan secara terang-terangan, tidak pandang bulu, terbuka, selalu segar dalam ingatan.”
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Barack Obama
“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”
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Barack Obama
“the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.”
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Barack Obama
“in a climate of constant technological change.”
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Barack Obama