“It was as if he had come to mistrust words somehow. Words, and the sentiments words carried.”
―
Barack Obama
“I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy.”
―
Barack Obama
“We're up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington or proximity to the White House. But we know that real leadership is about candor and judgment and the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose, a higher purpose.”
―
Barack Obama
“Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.”
―
Barack Obama
“Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes.”
―
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,”
―
Barack Obama
“But it’s just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes.”
―
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
“If you’re going to do this work, Barack, you’ve got to stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.” Patronage,”
―
Barack Obama
“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better”
―
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
“Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models.”
―
Barack Obama
“To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”
―
Barack Obama
“the resilience they had both displayed, the same stubborn strength that had lifted them out of bad circumstances. Except in Auma I had also sensed a willingness to put the past behind her, a capacity to somehow forgive, if not necessarily forget.”
―
Barack Obama
“I listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their formative years to hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state.”
―
Barack Obama
