“I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.”
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Barack Obama
“No, no. I have been practicing...I bowled a 129. It's like -- it was like Special Olympics, or something." --making an off-hand joke during an appearance on "The Tonight Show", March 19, 2009”
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Barack Obama
“I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.”
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Barack Obama
“Cynicism is a choice, and hope is a better choice.”
―
Barack Obama
“I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall.”
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Barack Obama
“If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works”
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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
“Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity -- of schedules and pastimes ad the weather -- became their principal consolation.”
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Barack Obama
“On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.”
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Barack Obama
“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better”
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Barack Obama
“To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”
―
Barack Obama
“But it’s just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes.”
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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.”
―
Barack Obama
“inexhaustible...our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.”
―
Barack Obama
