“Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity -- of schedules and pastimes ad the weather -- became their principal consolation.”

“the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.”

“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”

“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.”

“Di Indonesia, kekuasaan diperlihatkan secara terang-terangan, tidak pandang bulu, terbuka, selalu segar dalam ingatan.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there.  At least that's what I would choose to believe.”

“We are the change we have been waiting for.”

“All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.”

“You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want”

“nasionalisme terurai dalam sikap belaka dan bukan program konkret, setumpuk keluhan dan bukan kekuatan yang terorganisasi, gambar dan bunyi yang memadati gelombang udara dan percakapan, namun tanpa perwujudan jasadi.”

“On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.”

“I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.”

“For us to respond in that way to hateful speech... we empower the worst of us .. to create chaos around the world.”

“We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect.”