“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
“Where there is no experience the wise man is silent.”
―
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
“We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”
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Barack Obama
“Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess.”
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Barack Obama
“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web. Sometimes I think that’s why I like accounting. All day, you are only dealing with numbers. You add them, multiply them, and if you are careful, you will always have a solution. There’s a sequence there. An order. With numbers, you can have control….”
―
Barack Obama
“We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics...they will only grow louder and more dissonant ........... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
―
Barack Obama
“And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.”
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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.”
―
Barack Obama
“Let me tell your something. I'm from Chicago. I don't break.”
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Barack Obama
“Money is not the only answer, but it makes a difference.”
―
Barack Obama
“Each path to knowledge involves different rules and these rules are not interchangeable.”
―
Barack Obama
“A healthy, dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It’s what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.”
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Barack Obama
“Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.”
―
Barack Obama
