“How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes?
―
Barack Obama
“But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools - a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.”
―
Barack Obama
“Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes.”
―
Barack Obama
“of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went”
―
Barack Obama
“Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.”
―
Barack Obama
“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
―
Barack Obama
“If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription, who has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer - even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American or Mexican-American family being rounded up by John Ashcroft without benefit of an attorney or due process, I know that that threatens my civil liberties. And I don't have to be a woman to be concerned that the Supreme Court is trying to take away a woman's right, because I know that my rights are next. It is that fundamental belief - I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper - that makes this country work.”
―
Barack Obama
“For us to respond in that way to hateful speech... we empower the worst of us .. to create chaos around the world.”
―
Barack Obama
“And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.”
―
Barack Obama
“I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.”
―
Barack Obama
“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”
―
Barack Obama
“One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.
―
Barack Obama
“introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard”
―
Barack Obama