“It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks.”
―
Barack Obama
“If you’re going to do this work, Barack, you’ve got to stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.” Patronage,”
―
Barack Obama
“The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.”
―
Barack Obama
“Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.”
―
Barack Obama
“For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga- a belief that we're all connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me- even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer- even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief- I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper- that makes this country work.”
―
Barack Obama
“well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government”
―
Barack Obama
“People with disabilities deserve the chance to build a life for themselves in the communities where they choose to live.”
―
Barack Obama
“America will rise again. And hope will rise again.”
―
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
“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”
―
Barack Obama
“These others, they have treated you badly. They are just too lazy to work for themselves.’ And you know what he would say to me? He would say, ‘How do you know that man does not need this small thing more than me?”
―
Barack Obama
“introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard”
―
Barack Obama
“My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
―
Barack Obama
“The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight - that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie - contained a good deal of truth.”
―
Barack Obama
“inexhaustible...our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.”
―
Barack Obama
