“When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”
―
Barack Obama
“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web. Sometimes I think that’s why I like accounting. All day, you are only dealing with numbers. You add them, multiply them, and if you are careful, you will always have a solution. There’s a sequence there. An order. With numbers, you can have control….”
―
Barack Obama
“When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.”
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Barack Obama
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.”
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Barack Obama
“Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture -- hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.”
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Barack Obama
“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time,”
―
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”
―
Barack Obama
“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
―
Barack Obama
“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
“the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.”
―
Barack Obama
“Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.”
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Barack Obama
“I've now been in 57 states -- I think one left to go." --at a campaign event in Beaverton, Oregon”
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Barack Obama
“Same thing with the distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene … or just the consequences of a malnourished world? And”
―
Barack Obama
“I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but to him, it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and in that insisting on getting my own way all the time without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.
...In one form or another, it is what we all must go through in order to grow up.”
―
Barack Obama
