“We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time.”
―
Barack Obama
“Making products we sell around the world, stamped with three proud words, ‘Made in the USA!”
―
Barack Obama
“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
―
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
“the world was shrinking, sympathies changing;”
―
Barack Obama
“We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.”
―
Barack Obama
“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”
―
Barack Obama
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
―
Barack Obama
“And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.”
―
Barack Obama
“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
“It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.”
―
Barack Obama
“We may not be able to stop evil in the world, but how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”
―
Barack Obama
“education available to millions, government has helped”
―
Barack Obama
