“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.
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Barack Obama
“Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.”
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Barack Obama
“The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life.”
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Barack Obama
“This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.”
―
Barack Obama
“To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.”
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Barack Obama
“Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future.”
―
Barack Obama
“There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.”
―
Barack Obama
“You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig.”
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Barack Obama
“A nation that can't control its energy sources can't control its future.”
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Barack Obama
“We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”
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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
“Everything is organized. If something is broken, I fix it. If something goes wrong, it’s my own fault. If I have it, I send money to the family, and they can do with it what they want, and I won’t depend on them, and they won’t depend on me.”
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Barack Obama
“I think perhaps education doesn’t do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.”
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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
“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”
―
Barack Obama
