“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
“I've got daughters. Nine years old and six years old. First of all, I'm gonna teach them about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them PUNISHED with a baby.”
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Barack Obama
“The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.”
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Barack Obama
“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves.”
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Barack Obama
“We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
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Barack Obama
“You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”
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Barack Obama
“Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes.”
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Barack Obama
“I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
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Barack Obama
“Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves. ....In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work better if we recognized that all of us posses values worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledge that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.”
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Barack Obama
“We will outstretch the hand if you unclench your fist. ”
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Barack Obama
“It's not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children. I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those who are struggling. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.”
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Barack Obama
“It's in the misery of some unnamed slum that the next killer virus will emerge.”
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Barack Obama
“Semakin aku mengenal sistem, semakin aku yakin bahwa reformasi pendidikan adalah satu-satunya solusi bagi remaja bermasalah di luar sana. Tanpa keluarga yang stabil, tanpa prospek mendapatkan pekerjaan bergengsi yang akan membantu keuangan keluarga, pendidikan adalah harapan terbesar mereka.”
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Barack Obama
“In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?”
―
Barack Obama
“We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.”
―
Barack Obama
