“The American story has never been about things coming easy. It has been about rising to the moment when the moment is hard. About rejecting panicked division for purposeful unity. About seeing a mountaintop from the deepest valley. That is why we remember that some of the most famous words ever spoken by an American came from a president who took office in a time of turmoil: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
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Barack Obama
“church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of the same two questions. “Where’d you get that funny name?” And then: “You seem”
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Barack Obama
“The most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”
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Barack Obama
“He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.”
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Barack Obama
“The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight - that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie - contained a good deal of truth.”
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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
“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.”
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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
“For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.”
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Barack Obama
“The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.”
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Barack Obama
“Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.”
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Barack Obama
“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time,”
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Barack Obama
“You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.”
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Barack Obama
“If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening
―
Barack Obama
