“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
“Nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.”
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Barack Obama
“education available to millions, government has helped”
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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
“My little girls can break my heart. They can make me cry just looking at them eating their string beans.”
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Barack Obama
“But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew—Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq—fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own—my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval.”
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Barack Obama
“Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try to determine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speak out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the same sense of outrage that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.”
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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?”
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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. Burdens”
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Barack Obama
“all the education and good intentions in the world couldn’t help plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.”
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Barack Obama
“Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk.”
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Barack Obama
“For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.”
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Barack Obama
