“We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often that we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out bu intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words.”
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Barack Obama
“We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them,and drives us further apart.”
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Barack Obama
“America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.”
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Barack Obama
“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear. Burdens”
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Barack Obama
“ALMOST A DECADE HAS passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original 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 Law Review. In the wake of some modest”
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Barack Obama
“My heart is filled with love for this country.”
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Barack Obama
“It's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”
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Barack Obama
“Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.”
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Barack Obama
“And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.”
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Barack Obama
“In a...media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter...Information [can] become a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”
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Barack Obama
“Making products we sell around the world, stamped with three proud words, ‘Made in the USA!”
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Barack Obama
“Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk.”
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Barack Obama
“There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.”
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Barack Obama
“My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
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Barack Obama
“A healthy, dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It’s what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.”
―
Barack Obama
