“we have been told we cannot do this by a coarse of sentence: it will only grow louder and more dissident. we have been asked to pause for a reality check, we have been warned about offering this nation false hope, but in the unlikely story that is america there has never been anything false about hope. nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change the hopes of little girl who goes to a public school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of a little boy who learns on the streets of L.A. We will remember that there is something happening in America, that we are not as devided as our politics suggest, that we are one people, we are one nation and together we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: YES WE CAN! yes we can to justice and equality yes we can to oppurtunity and prosperity”

“What matters is how well we have loved.”

“Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

“If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.”

“Let me tell your something. I'm from Chicago. I don't break.”

“You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want”

“For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.”

“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,”

“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.

“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”

“Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters. But I don't think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way-in their own lives, at least- to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves. ...I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but they recognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting. They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”

“All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.”

“Finally, there are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work: the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one’s experiences hold for others,”

“Folks hear stories like that, they just stop trying to talk to these young cats out here. We start generalizing about ’em just like the white folks do. We see ’em hanging out, we head the other way. After a while, even the good kid starts realizing ain’t nobody out here gonna look out for him. So he figures he’s gonna have to look after himself. Bottom line, you got twelve-year-olds making their own damn rules.” Johnnie”