“What's missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.”
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Barack Obama
“Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.”
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Barack Obama
“I realized that in some unspoken, still tentative way, she and I were already becoming a family.”
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Barack Obama
“That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie.”
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Barack Obama
“It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: (White) People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”
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Barack Obama
“Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.”
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Barack Obama
“stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure, that it will prevail, that the dream of our founders will live on in our time.
Barack Obama
At the Lincolm Memorial concert on National Mall in Washington, January 18, 2009, two days before his inauguration as US President.”
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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
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Barack Obama
“Our stories may be singular, but our destination is shared.”
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Barack Obama
“We will extend our arms to you[world] if you unclench your fists.”
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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.”
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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
“Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.”
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Barack Obama
“The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.”
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Barack Obama
“The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”
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Barack Obama