“For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.”
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Barack Obama
“Over the last fifteen months we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been to fifty-seven states. I think, one left to go.”
―
Barack Obama
“I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
―
Barack Obama
“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”
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Barack Obama
“And that, I suppose, is what I'd been trying to tell my mother that day: that her faith in justice and rationality was misplaced, that we couldn't overcome after all, that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn't help you plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.”
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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
“When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”
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Barack Obama
“Elle était jolie, Joyce, avec ses yeux verts, sa peau de miel et sa moue boudeuse. (...) Un jour je lui demandais si elle allait à la réunion de l'Association des étudiants noirs. Elle me lança un drôle de regard, puis elle secoua la tête (...): — Je ne suis pas noire, me répondit-elle. Je suis multiraciale. (...) Pourquoi voudrais-tu que je choisisse entre [mon père italien et ma mère africaine-indienne] ? (...) Ce ne sont pas les Blancs qui veulent me faire choisir, (...) ce sont les Noirs.”
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Barack Obama
“Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess.”
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Barack Obama
“It’s the founding ideals that the flag draped over my father’s coffin stand for."
Truth: His father was buried in Kenya, never served in the U.S. military. Which flag draped his father’s coffin? And what ideals does the flag that draped his father’s coffin in Kenya stand for?”
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Barack Obama
“We will outstretch the hand if you unclench your fist. ”
―
Barack Obama
“perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer.”
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Barack Obama
“All too rarely do I hear people asking just what it is that we've done to make so many children's hearts so hard, or what collectively we might do to right their moral compass - what values we must live by.”
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Barack Obama
“How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?”
―
Barack Obama