“like politics?” I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It”
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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
“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time,”
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Barack Obama
“What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress.”
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Barack Obama
“We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”
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Barack Obama
“The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. . . . What I think we know — separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in their country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”
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Barack Obama
“I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.”
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Barack Obama
“When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president…the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy." President Obama, in conversation with Marilynne Robinson, in New York Review of Books”
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Barack Obama
“America will rise again. And hope will rise again.”
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Barack Obama
“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves.”
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Barack Obama
“The best anti-poverty program is a world-class education.”
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Barack Obama
“I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers.”
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Barack Obama
“When I see Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously. I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses.”
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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
“We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape.”
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Barack Obama
