“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”
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Barack Obama
“I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all. And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.
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Barack Obama
“The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.
―
Barack Obama
“We are the change we have been waiting for.”
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Barack Obama
“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
“I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
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Barack Obama
this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal ..."~~Barack Obama upon winning the Democratic nomination for presidency conveys his thinking of what that means ....for the world, Tuesday, JUNE 03, 2008”
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Barack Obama
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
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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
“it’s important to make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
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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.
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Barack Obama
“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well.”
―
Barack Obama
“Change won't come from the top, Change will come from mobilized grassroots.”
―
Barack Obama
