“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
“How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?”
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Barack Obama
“I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.”
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Barack Obama
“But that’s part of what makes America wonderful, is we always had this nagging dissatisfaction that spurs us on. That’s how we ended up going west, that’s how we--“I’m tired of all these people back east; if I go west, there’s going to be my own land and I’m not going to have to put up with this nonsense, and I’m going to start my own thing, and I’ve got my homestead.” ...It is true, though, that that restlessness and that dissatisfaction which has helped us go to the moon and create the Internet and build the Transcontinental Railroad and build our land-grant colleges, that those things, born of dissatisfaction, we can very rapidly then take for granted and not tend to and not defend, and not understand how precious these things are.”
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Barack Obama
“The American story has never been about things coming easy. It has been about rising to the moment when the moment is hard. About rejecting panicked division for purposeful unity. About seeing a mountaintop from the deepest valley. That is why we remember that some of the most famous words ever spoken by an American came from a president who took office in a time of turmoil: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
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Barack Obama
“Had to be here to understand,” he had said. He’d meant here in Chicago; but he could also have meant here in my shoes, an older black man who still burns from a lifetime of insults, of foiled ambitions, of ambitions abandoned before they’ve been tried. I asked myself if I could truly understand that. I assumed, took for granted, that I could. Seeing me, these men had made the same assumption.”
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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.”
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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
“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”
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Barack Obama
“of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went”
―
Barack Obama
“I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers.”
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Barack Obama
“nasionalisme terurai dalam sikap belaka dan bukan program konkret, setumpuk keluhan dan bukan kekuatan yang terorganisasi, gambar dan bunyi yang memadati gelombang udara dan percakapan, namun tanpa perwujudan jasadi.”
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Barack Obama
“church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of the same two questions. “Where’d you get that funny name?” And then: “You seem”
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Barack Obama
“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time,”
―
Barack Obama
“I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn’t do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.”
―
Barack Obama
