“We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them,and drives us further apart.”
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Barack Obama
“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.”
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Barack Obama
“Moreover, I believe that part of America's genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shores. In this we've been aided by a Constitution that--despite being marred by the original sin of slavery--has at its very core the ideas of equal citizenship under the laws; and an economic system that, more than any other, has offered opportunity to all comers, regardless of status or title or rank.”
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Barack Obama
“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”
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Barack Obama
“it’s important to make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
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Barack Obama
“We went down into the dungeons where the captives were held. There was a church above one of the dungeons -- which tells you something about saying one thing and doing another. (Applause.) I was -- we walked through the "Door Of No Return." I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom.”
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Barack Obama
“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”
―
Barack Obama
“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”
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Barack Obama
“There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.”
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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
“Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity -- of schedules and pastimes ad the weather -- became their principal consolation.”
―
Barack Obama
