“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
“Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try to determine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speak out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the same sense of outrage that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.”
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Barack Obama
“anger's a requirement for the job. The only reason anybody decides to become and organiser. Well adjusted people find more relaxing work”
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Barack Obama
“Finally, there are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work: the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one’s experiences hold for others,”
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Barack Obama
“You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.”
―
Barack Obama
“A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.”
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Barack Obama
“As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything.”
―
Barack Obama
“I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around congress."
Truth: He’s used signing statements over 20 times.
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Barack Obama
“For my grandfather, race wasn’t something you really needed to worry about anymore; if ignorance still held fast in certain locales, it was safe to assume that the rest of the world would be catching up soon.
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Barack Obama
“We’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.”
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Barack Obama
“You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.”
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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.”
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Barack Obama
“I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.”
―
Barack Obama
“Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.”
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Barack Obama
“Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future.”
―
Barack Obama
