“It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks.”
―
Barack Obama
“When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”
―
Barack Obama
“What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
―
Barack Obama
“I found god in myself and I loved her / I loved her fiercely
―
Barack Obama
“My little girls can break my heart. They can make me cry just looking at them eating their string beans.”
―
Barack Obama
“My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there.
At least that's what I would choose to believe.”
―
Barack Obama
“Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.
―
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”
―
Barack Obama
“We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”
―
Barack Obama
“When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president…the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy." President Obama, in conversation with Marilynne Robinson, in New York Review of Books”
―
Barack Obama
“The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”
―
Barack Obama
“I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”
―
Barack Obama
“Where there is no experience the wise man is silent.”
―
Barack Obama
“We have our own ways, our own memories, and what has happened between all of us is hard to undo.”
―
Barack Obama
“At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life-- what you look like,where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home--none of that is an excuse... where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No ones written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write you own destiny.You make your own future.”
―
Barack Obama
