“More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world--a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward. . . . .
Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.
And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.”
―
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.”
―
Barack Obama
“If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”
―
Barack Obama
“In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”
―
Barack Obama
“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”
―
Barack Obama
“Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try to determine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speak out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the same sense of outrage that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.”
―
Barack Obama
“A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.”
―
Barack Obama
“Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I’d become troubled by questions.”
―
Barack Obama
“I'm inspired by the people I meet in my travels--hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I'm inspired by the love people have for their children. And I'm inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man.”
―
Barack Obama
“perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer.”
―
Barack Obama
“Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the subjects they're teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools.”
―
Barack Obama
“There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.”
―
Barack Obama
“I realized that in some unspoken, still tentative way, she and I were already becoming a family.”
―
Barack Obama
“For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.”
―
Barack Obama
“You know, sometimes I'll go to an 8th-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just 8th grade ... An 8th-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!”
―
Barack Obama
