“Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.”
―
Barack Obama
“anger's a requirement for the job. The only reason anybody decides to become and organiser. Well adjusted people find more relaxing work”
―
Barack Obama
“The people back home, they didn’t even know anyone else who had ridden in an airplane before. So they expected everything from him. ‘Ah, Barack, you are a big shot now. You should give me something. You should help me.’ Always these pressures from family. And he couldn’t say no, he was so generous. You”
―
Barack Obama
“What's missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.”
―
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. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But”
―
Barack Obama
“He's basically a good man. But he doesn't know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can't know me, not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They've seen their fathers humiliated. Their mothers desecrated. But your grandfather will never know what that feels like.”
―
Barack Obama
“Our values call upon us to care about people we'll never meet.”
―
Barack Obama
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
―
Barack Obama
“We will extend our arms to you[world] if you unclench your fists.”
―
Barack Obama
“I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
―
Barack Obama
“Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect.”
―
Barack Obama
“We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect.”
―
Barack Obama
“Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work.”
―
Barack Obama
“Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk.”
―
Barack Obama
“You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want”
―
Barack Obama
