“We are made for this moment, and we will seize it-so long as we seize it together.”
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Barack Obama
“I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
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Barack Obama
“And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.”
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Barack Obama
“the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.”
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Barack Obama
“And that’s the work of your generation. As long as more walls still stand...We’ll need more of you, young people, who imagine the world as it should be; who knock down walls; who knock down barriers; who imagine something different and have the courage to make it happen. The courage to bring communities together, to make even the small impossibilities a shining example of what is possible.”
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Barack Obama
“Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”
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Barack Obama
“It's in the misery of some unnamed slum that the next killer virus will emerge.”
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Barack Obama
“The stakes involved in Washington policy debates are often so high-- whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward-- that even small differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperative of campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to an atmosphere of suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or as political operatives-- professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. I can see how, after a certain amount of time in the capital, it becomes tempting to assume that those who disagree with you have fundamentally different values-- indeed, that they are motivated by bad faith, and perhaps are bad people.”
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Barack Obama
“If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.”
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Barack Obama
“Just a negative attitude, you understand. growing up in alt geld, i'd soaked up all the poison the white man feeds us. see, the folks you're working with got the same problem, even though they dont realize it yet. they spend half they lives worrying about what the white folks think. start blaming themselves for the shit they see every day, thinking they cant do no better till the white man decides they all right. but deep down they know that ain't right. they know what this country has dont to their momma, their daddy, their sister. so the truth is they hate their folks, but they cant admit it to themselves, keep it all bottled up, fighting themselves. waste a lot of energy that way. i tell you one thing i admire about the white folks, they know who they are. look at the italians. they didn't care about the American flag and all that when they got here. first thing they did is to put together the mafia to make sure their intrests were met. the irish they took the city hall and found their boys jobs. the Jews the same thing.. you telling me they care more about some black kid in the south side than they do about they relatives in isarel? shit!> its about blood, Barack, looking after your own. period. black people the only ones stupid enough to worry about their enemies.”
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Barack Obama
“There's a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out: 'Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, I'm entitled to my own opinion." To which Moynihan frostily replied, "You are entitled to you own opinion, but you are not entitled to you own facts.”
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Barack Obama
“What's happened here, Sayid? There never used to be such begging."
"You are right," he said. "I believe they have learned this thing from those in the city. People come back from Nairobi or Kisumu and tell them, 'You are poor.' So now we have this idea of poverty. We didn't have this idea before. You look at my mother. She will never ask for anything. She has always something that she is doing. None of it brings much money, but it is something, you see. It gives her pride. Anyone could do the same, but many people here, they prefer to give up.”
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Barack Obama
“And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.”
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Barack Obama
“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.
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Barack Obama
“Nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.”
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Barack Obama
