“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

“Don’t be thick, all right? I’m not just talking about one time. Look, I ask Monica out, she says no. I say okay … your shit’s not so hot anyway.”

“They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. 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. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don't want to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-- although that's what we tell ourselves-- but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don't know who I am? I'm an individual!”

“Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.”

“How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes?

“the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.”

“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.”

“The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person…”

“education available to millions, government has helped”

“I believe in (the American) people. I believe that people are more good than bad. I believe tragic things happen. I think there's evil in the world. But I think that at the end of the day, if we work hard, and if we're true to those things in us that feel true and feel right, that, the world gets a little better each time. That's what this presidency is trying to be about. And I see that in the young people i work with. This is not just drama-obama. This is what I really believe.”

“I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.”

“Ours is not the first generation to understand the dire need for health reform. And I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

“But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”

“White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase.”

“We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.”