“The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.”
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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
“all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.”
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Barack Obama
“There was something to what he said, for it was true that the people I met on the job were generally much older than me, with a set of concerns and demands that created barriers to friendship. When I wasn’t working, the weekends would usually find me alone in an empty apartment, making do with the company of books. I”
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Barack Obama
“This pleased Onyango, for to him knowledge was the source of all the white man's power, and he wanted to make sure that his son was as educated as any white man.”
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Barack Obama
“For us to respond in that way to hateful speech... we empower the worst of us .. to create chaos around the world.”
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Barack Obama
“The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. . . . What I think we know — separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in their country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”
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Barack Obama
“We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.”
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Barack Obama
“Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”
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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
“What makes a man is not the ability to have a child but having the courage to raise one.”
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Barack Obama
“We are made for this moment, and we will seize it-so long as we seize it together.”
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Barack Obama
“the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...”
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Barack Obama
“The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.”
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Barack Obama
“We have our own ways, our own memories, and what has happened between all of us is hard to undo.”
―
Barack Obama
