“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
“I don’t like politics much,” she said. “Why’s that?” “I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”
―
Barack Obama
“When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”
―
Barack Obama
“But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools - a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.”
―
Barack Obama
“Folks hear stories like that, they just stop trying to talk to these young cats out here. We start generalizing about ’em just like the white folks do. We see ’em hanging out, we head the other way. After a while, even the good kid starts realizing ain’t nobody out here gonna look out for him. So he figures he’s gonna have to look after himself. Bottom line, you got twelve-year-olds making their own damn rules.” Johnnie”
―
Barack Obama
“We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them,and drives us further apart.”
―
Barack Obama
“inexhaustible...our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.”
―
Barack Obama
“But it’s just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes.”
―
Barack Obama
“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”
―
Barack Obama
“Making products we sell around the world, stamped with three proud words, ‘Made in the USA!”
―
Barack Obama
“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
―
Barack Obama
“Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.”
―
Barack Obama
“Let me tell your something. I'm from Chicago. I don't break.”
―
Barack Obama
“The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.”
―
Barack Obama
“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”
―
Barack Obama
