“Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.”
―
Barack Obama
“Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up”
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Barack Obama
“it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight!”
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Barack Obama
“It was like - It was like Special Olympics or something.”
―
Barack Obama
“You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless.”
―
Barack Obama
“In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died -- an entire town destroyed." --on a Kansas tornado that killed 12 people”
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Barack Obama
“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns in to universal, rather than religion-specific, values... it requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.
Now I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”
―
Barack Obama
“If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.”
―
Barack Obama
“What I’ve realized is that life doesn’t count for much unless you’re willing to do your small part to leave our children — all of our children — a better world. Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”
―
Barack Obama
“How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes?
―
Barack Obama
“the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...”
―
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
“For us to respond in that way to hateful speech... we empower the worst of us .. to create chaos around the world.”
―
Barack Obama
