“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”b”

“All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.”

“But it’s just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes.” 

“I've now been in 57 states -- I think one left to go." --at a campaign event in Beaverton, Oregon” 

“the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done. It was a pretty convincing”

“America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.”

“We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.”

“Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.”

“If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”

“We don't ask you to believe in our ability to bring change, rather, we ask you to believe in yours.”

“Same thing with the distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene … or just the consequences of a malnourished world? And”

“That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie.”

“inexhaustible...our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.”

“Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess.”

“Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters. But I don't think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way-in their own lives, at least- to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves. ...I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but they recognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting. They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”