“What I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim”
―
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
“It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountain top and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can!”
―
Barack Obama
“We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.”
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Barack Obama
“The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”
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Barack Obama
“The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.
―
Barack Obama
“They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think.”
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Barack Obama
“We may not be able to stop evil in the world, but how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”
―
Barack Obama
“doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”
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Barack Obama
“Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.
―
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.”
―
Barack Obama
“The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.”
―
Barack Obama
“You have the ability and gifts to do whatever you want". It is your turn now to change the world. Yes we can!”
―
Barack Obama
“When I meet with world leaders, what’s striking — whether it’s in Europe or here in Asia…” — Barack Obama, mistakenly referring to Hawaii as Asia while holding a press conference outside Honolulu, Nov. 16, 2011”
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Barack Obama
“My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there.
At least that's what I would choose to believe.”
―
Barack Obama