“That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories. ”
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Barack Obama
“I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.”
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Barack Obama
“We will outstretch the hand if you unclench your fist. ”
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Barack Obama
“nasionalisme terurai dalam sikap belaka dan bukan program konkret, setumpuk keluhan dan bukan kekuatan yang terorganisasi, gambar dan bunyi yang memadati gelombang udara dan percakapan, namun tanpa perwujudan jasadi.”
―
Barack Obama
“in a climate of constant technological change.”
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Barack Obama
“You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”
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Barack Obama
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.”
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Barack Obama
“In a...media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter...Information [can] become a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”
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Barack Obama
“There's no such thing as a vote that doesn't matter.”
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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
“Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.”
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Barack Obama
“Just a negative attitude, you understand. growing up in alt geld, i'd soaked up all the poison the white man feeds us. see, the folks you're working with got the same problem, even though they dont realize it yet. they spend half they lives worrying about what the white folks think. start blaming themselves for the shit they see every day, thinking they cant do no better till the white man decides they all right. but deep down they know that ain't right. they know what this country has dont to their momma, their daddy, their sister. so the truth is they hate their folks, but they cant admit it to themselves, keep it all bottled up, fighting themselves. waste a lot of energy that way. i tell you one thing i admire about the white folks, they know who they are. look at the italians. they didn't care about the American flag and all that when they got here. first thing they did is to put together the mafia to make sure their intrests were met. the irish they took the city hall and found their boys jobs. the Jews the same thing.. you telling me they care more about some black kid in the south side than they do about they relatives in isarel? shit!> its about blood, Barack, looking after your own. period. black people the only ones stupid enough to worry about their enemies.”
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Barack Obama
