“All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.”
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Barack Obama
“Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture -- hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.”
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Barack Obama
“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.”
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Barack Obama
“Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.”
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Barack Obama
“India, US to resume talks on investment pact; US President Barack Obama lauds reforms”
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Barack Obama
“I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.”
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Barack Obama
“No, no. I have been practicing...I bowled a 129. It's like -- it was like Special Olympics, or something." --making an off-hand joke during an appearance on "The Tonight Show", March 19, 2009”
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Barack Obama
“And then, on September 11, the world fractured.
It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow--the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.”
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Barack Obama
“Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.
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Barack Obama
“Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land: enough! This moment, this election is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On Nov. 4, we must stand up and say: "Eight is enough.”
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Barack Obama
“One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.
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Barack Obama
“He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think—the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised.”
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Barack Obama
“And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found most compelling.”
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Barack Obama
“Change will not happen if we wait for another person or another time. We are the person that we are waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
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Barack Obama
“Same thing with the distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene … or just the consequences of a malnourished world? And”
―
Barack Obama
