“Well, amigo … you can talk all you want about saving the world, but this city tends to eat away at such noble sentiments.”
―
Barack Obama
“I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers.”
―
Barack Obama
“it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight!”
―
Barack Obama
“I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
―
Barack Obama
“We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect.”
―
Barack Obama
“America will rise again. And hope will rise again.”
―
Barack Obama
“You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want”
―
Barack Obama
“Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I’d become troubled by questions.”
―
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
“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
“of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went”
―
Barack Obama
“Don’t be thick, all right? I’m not just talking about one time. Look, I ask Monica out, she says no. I say okay … your shit’s not so hot anyway.”
―
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.”
―
Barack Obama
“That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories. ”
―
Barack Obama
