“What makes a man is not the ability to have a child but having the courage to raise one.”
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Barack Obama
“The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.”
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Barack Obama
“We don't ask you to believe in our ability to bring change, rather, we ask you to believe in yours.”
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Barack Obama
“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns in to universal, rather than religion-specific, values... it requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.
Now I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”
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Barack Obama
“The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those - like the White House press office - who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.”
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Barack Obama
“The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.”
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Barack Obama
“There's no such thing as a vote that doesn't matter.”
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Barack Obama
“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.”
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Barack Obama
“Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up”
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Barack Obama
“The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. . . . What I think we know — separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in their country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”
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Barack Obama
“I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.”
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Barack Obama
“I've been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.”
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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
