“India, US to resume talks on investment pact; US President Barack Obama lauds reforms”
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Barack Obama
“It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.”
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Barack Obama
“For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.”
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Barack Obama
“Indeed, it's not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead, representatives choose their voters.”
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Barack Obama
“You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”
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Barack Obama
“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”
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Barack Obama
“Same thing with the distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids—the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene … or just the consequences of a malnourished world? And”
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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
“You have the ability and gifts to do whatever you want". It is your turn now to change the world. Yes we can!”
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Barack Obama
“When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.”
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Barack Obama
“Our values call upon us to care about the lives of people we will never meet.”
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Barack Obama
“Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture -- hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.”
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Barack Obama
“I've now been in 57 states -- I think one left to go." --at a campaign event in Beaverton, Oregon”
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Barack Obama
“America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.”
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Barack Obama