“like politics?” I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It”
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Barack Obama
“of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went”
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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
“If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.”
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Barack Obama
“Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land: enough! This moment, this election is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On Nov. 4, we must stand up and say: "Eight is enough.”
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Barack Obama
“Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.”
Truth: Obama later said, “This was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech and we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given. The point we were simply making was, is that we don’t want barbed wire running through Jerusalem.”
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Barack Obama
“I listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their formative years to hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state.”
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Barack Obama
“That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie.”
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Barack Obama
“Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.”
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Barack Obama
“All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.”
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Barack Obama
“You have the ability and gifts to do whatever you want". It is your turn now to change the world. Yes we can!”
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Barack Obama
“It [is] that courage that Africa most desperately needs.”
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Barack Obama
“If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening
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Barack Obama
“The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person…”
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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