“I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt.”
―
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
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.”
―
Barack Obama
“The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight - that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie - contained a good deal of truth.”
―
Barack Obama
“I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
―
Barack Obama
“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.”
―
Barack Obama
“What I could not support was "a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics"
―
Barack Obama
“Where there is no experience the wise man is silent.”
―
Barack Obama
“We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.”
―
Barack Obama
“I think perhaps education doesn’t do us much good unless it is mixed with sweat.”
―
Barack Obama
“In return, I gave him a sounding board for his frustrations.”
―
Barack Obama
“The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.
―
Barack Obama
“church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of the same two questions. “Where’d you get that funny name?” And then: “You seem”
―
Barack Obama
“What's missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.”
―
Barack Obama
“People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.”
―
Barack Obama
