“stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure, that it will prevail, that the dream of our founders will live on in our time.
Barack Obama
At the Lincolm Memorial concert on National Mall in Washington, January 18, 2009, two days before his inauguration as US President.”
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Barack Obama
“the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done. It was a pretty convincing”
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Barack Obama
“Well, amigo … you can talk all you want about saving the world, but this city tends to eat away at such noble sentiments.”
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Barack Obama
“The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person…”
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Barack Obama
“The result is autobiographical, although whenever someone’s asked me over the course of these last three years just what the book is about, I’ve usually avoided such a description. An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here.”
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Barack Obama
“We went down into the dungeons where the captives were held. There was a church above one of the dungeons -- which tells you something about saying one thing and doing another. (Applause.) I was -- we walked through the "Door Of No Return." I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom.”
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Barack Obama
“perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.”
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Barack Obama
“For if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”
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Barack Obama
“When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he’d expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry.”
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Barack Obama
“I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall.”
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Barack Obama
“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better”
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Barack Obama
“Let me tell your something. I'm from Chicago. I don't break.”
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Barack Obama
“There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.”
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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
“In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended.”
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Barack Obama