“all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.”
―
Barack Obama
“But it’s just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes.”
―
Barack Obama
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth
―
Barack Obama
“This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.”
―
Barack Obama
“Well, amigo … you can talk all you want about saving the world, but this city tends to eat away at such noble sentiments.”
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Barack Obama
“This pleased Onyango, for to him knowledge was the source of all the white man's power, and he wanted to make sure that his son was as educated as any white man.”
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Barack Obama
“inexhaustible...our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.”
―
Barack Obama
“In return, I gave him a sounding board for his frustrations.”
―
Barack Obama
“I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
―
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.”
―
Barack Obama
“A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.”
―
Barack Obama
“I don’t like politics much,” she said. “Why’s that?” “I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”
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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 began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream...he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic. ”
―
Barack Obama
